Hi all guru out there. I have a problem making the wifi work for me on Slackware 10.

I installed the Buffalo WLI-USB-KB11 with driver prism2_usb and using the wireless installation tool comes with Slackware 10, I can detect the wifi device. And then I run the following commands:

ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 mode managed -------- get error :

root@LonelyHawk:~# iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
Error for wireless request "Set Mode" (8B06) :
SET failed on device wlan0 ; Operation not supported.

and then I do

dhcpcd wlan0

however, I didn't get an IP address from the AP.

I used the kwifimanager and I can see the AP I wanted to connected and it did say it is connected to the ESSID specified and the signal is strong too.

I had used the netconfig to setup the DHCP but didn't help.

I had also configure the /etc/wlan.conf

Please help !

The prism2 driver (from linux-wlan-ng) doesn't support using iwconfig commands. Look at the README that comes with the drivers (they come with the source at ftp.linux-wlan.com ) and it'll have the right commands.

Hi WMD,

thank you very much for your reply. You did remind me to read the readme again and I found that I missed two commands :

C) Run 'modprobe prism2_usb prism2_doreset=1' to load the driver into memory.
D) Run 'wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=enable' to initialize the
driver+MAC functions.
E) Run 'wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_autojoin ssid=<your ssid> authtype=opensystem'
to enable the MAC in Infrastructure Station mode.
F) Run 'ifconfig wlan0 <your IP address>'

I didn't do F) but did do C,D and E with success - the return code say so. I used the Kwifimanager and found that my linux did connected to the network I want to connected - the ESSID I defined and it also shows the MAC address of the AP. Unfortunately, when I do

dhcpcd wlan0

no IP address is returned.

It seems that the AP is not answering - I did check with "ifconfig wlan0" and see the USB widget do sent out something when I do dhcpcd !

Any idea why the dhcpcd didn't work or the AP didn't response ?

Many thanks !

Hi WMD,

I finally make the widget works ! I think there is something wrong with my WEP setting. After I disable the WEP from the AP, I can get the IP address correctly. Obviously, it is not a very good solution but did give me a starting point to debug !

Many thanks !

hopper

You might want to just use a static IP address. For example, if your router is 192.168.0.1, say: ifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.2. That'll give you that IP and you'd be able to use WEP again.

Hi WMD,

Thank you for the suggestion and I did consider that at one point. However, I didn't know how to set static address for all the PC in my network, so I give up. To put on more security on my network, I decided to use MAC address filtering so that only a handful of PC in my house can access the network !

By the way, I have 3 real IP addresses, by using a switch, I allocate one address to my son who use netmeeting very often and then I pull another line to the wireless router and I persumed that it will consume another real address. Do you know how to get the third real IP address through the wireless router ??

Many many thanks !!