Wireless Trouble

[Oxygen]

Belkin 54g Wireless IEEE 802.11b PCI card. It took me ages to originally install it, but when I'd figured out how, it was always simple... until now. I formatted my machine and installed Ubuntu (Originally Kubuntu) after a few package problems I installed the kernel headers and ndiswrapper, everything was fine and dandy, modprobe didn't give any errors or warnings. Now, I did iwconfig eth1 ESSID <my essid> and iwconfig eth1 key s:<my 13 digit key> and iwconfig eth1 mode Managed. It had all the settings there but it just won't connect, it says the connection point is invalid.

Some other points, iwlist eth1 scan tells me that the device doesn't support scanning and iwconfig eth1 says the security mode is set to open but on my Windows box is set to shared, I don't know what command changes it.

Speculation people, what could be the cause, I really don't have a specific error to give.

[ihavenoidea]

ok you modprobed ndiswrapper, but didnt load it. Just to make sure do a ndiswrapper -l to see if it says driver present hardware present. If all goes well, easiest way is to add "ndiswrapper" (without quotes) to /etc/modules.d (i think thats right in ubuntu, not exactly sure) and then reboot.

[antidrugue]

Hi Oxygen. I guess you know the basics, since you wrote that tutorial and that one (which you should correct by the way, the line tar xvf ndiswrapper-1.3rc1.tar.gz is wrong).

Which Windows drivers did you try ?

Also, did you insert the bcmwl5.inf file or the bcmwl5a.inf one ?
Did you made sure you blacklisted the BCM43XX driver ? More here (BCM43XX tutorial) and there (NDISWRAPPER tutorial).


Which version of Ubuntu ? Which version of ndiswrapper ? The one included in Ubuntu ?

[Oxygen]

Yeah, that tutorial is crap, I wish I'd never written it.

I don't know anymore, I gave up, I'm gona go back to my original setup or just get another distro, I eventually got rid of ndiswrapper and used firmware cutter to get... firmware. I think I may of got it to work but then net mask troubles just screwed me over.

[antidrugue]

Yeah, that tutorial is crap, I wish I'd never written it.

I don't think so. It is a fine generic tutorial.

I don't know anymore, I gave up, I'm gona go back to my original setup or just get another distro, I eventually got rid of ndiswrapper and used firmware cutter to get... firmware.

Perhaps the BCM43XX driver is the way to go now. Last time I checked (a while ago), it didn't work very well. I believe it is just fine by now though.

[Oxygen]

Ok, this is what's happened.

I installed Kubuntu and I've came across the same problem, but I guessed the problem wrong last time. The driver (I ended up using BCM43XX instead of ndiswrapper) is working, it can scan for local networks. But it won't seem to connect, and I don't know why, KWiFiAssistant says that it can't connect even though I HAVE written in the correct config. It uses a 13 digit ASCII key and it uses shared network authentication. I think this is the same problem as I had before but I didn't have a wireless manager to tell me. Also I probably could go back to Ubuntu.

So what could the problem be? What's stopping it from connecting?

BTW concerning that article, I wrote it knowing nothing about Linux, only reason I made it was because it took me so damn long to figure out how to get it working, I figured some other people may benefit from it. It's probably a bit out dated since BCM43XX deals with most cards.

I just realised there is a wireless forum... would a mod please move this?