Network-Manager doesn't Recognize my Wireless Card

AlfredSka · 05-12-2007, 01:15 PM

I'm one of the many who suffers from network drop-outs using the madwifi/network-manager combination with my network card (See bugs: 64173 and 37821 on Lauchpad.net). I've since switched to manually starting my network using wpa_supplicant. In addition I've abandoned madwifi in favor of ndiswrapper around the latest driver available for my Netgear WG311T which is relatively new as of this writing (Dec '06).

Here's what I've done so far, and it's working well:

Blacklist madwifi:

Code:

sudo gedit /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common
  DISABLED_MODULES="ath_hal"

Install windows driver:

Code:

sudo ndiswrapper -i driver.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -m

Change alias in /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper from wlan0 to ath0

Enter network information:

Code:

sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces
auto ath0
 iface ath0 inet dhcp
 wpa-ssid <essid name>
 wpa-psk <password>

I've since installed network-manager to see if it would fare better with my ndiswrapper driver than it did with the madwifi stack. Unfortunately, network-manager doesn't even recognize that the card is installed. This is confirmed again when using the "Windows Wireless Drivers" utility. Yet, the wireless device shows up under "Network" in the utilities menu.

Is there a way to make network-manager recognize my wireless adapter, so I can see if it is stable with my ndiswrapper driver?

masonm · 05-12-2007, 05:23 PM

Try changing the alias to eth0. I've noticed the network manager seems to have a problem with anything that isn't eth.

fragos · 05-12-2007, 05:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by masonm

Try changing the alias to eth0. I've noticed the network manager seems to have a problem with anything that isn't eth.

Normally Ubuntu assigns eth0 to your wired port and when I installed wireless it assigned eth1 to that.

AlfredSka · 05-14-2007, 07:12 PM

It looks like the biggest problem had to do with the fact that I had manually specified '<essid name>' and 'wpa-psk <password>' in /etc/network/interfaces. Nonetheless, I did rename my alias to wlan0, commented out the above manual configuration lines, and now network manager works with ndiswrapper... mostly. I'm not sure if it has to do with ndiswrapper not loading quickly or something else, but on boot, network-manager isn't able to associate with the network right away. I have to wait for it to fail, then tell it to connect to my network. The great news is that it STAYS connected, no drop-outs.

fragos · 05-14-2007, 08:35 PM

You might try right clicking the network manager icon, uncheck "Enable Networking" and the check it as in stop then start. I haven't noticed any unusual behavior like this on my system.