Wireless card & AP recognized in MEPIS, but not available

[Paul Adasiak]

I have just installed SimplyMEPIS 7.0 (32-bit) on my father's laptop -- a Toshiba Sattelite M105-S3004 -- and am having trouble getting the wireless connection to work. It appears that the computer recognizes the existence of the wireless card and of the wireless network, but, for reasons currently beyond me, they won't speak to each other.

The output of lspci -v is:

03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Unknown device 1040
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
        Memory at d0100000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Capabilities: [c8] Power Management version 2
        Capabilities: [d0] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-
        Capabilities: [e0] Express Legacy Endpoint IRQ 0
        Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
        Capabilities: [140] Device Serial Number f7-85-12-ff-ff-02-13-00

The output of iwconfig is:

lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

eth1      unassociated  ESSID:off/any
          Mode:Managed  Frequency=nan kHz  Access Point: Not-Associated
          Bit Rate:0 kb/s   Tx-Power:16 dBm
          Retry limit:15   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:100   Missed beacon:0

The output of iwlist eth1 scan is:

eth1      Scan completed :
          Cell 01 - Address: 00:16:B6:0C:C8:54
                    ESSID:"ABAWireless"
                    Protocol:IEEE 802.11bg
                    Mode:Master
                    Channel:4
                    Frequency:2.427 GHz (Channel 4)
                    Encryption key:on
                    Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s
                              11 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s
                              48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
                    Quality=98/100  Signal level=-25 dBm  Noise level=-25 dBm
                    IE: WPA Version 1
                        Group Cipher : TKIP
                        Pairwise Ciphers (1) : TKIP
                        Authentication Suites (1) : PSK
                    Extra: Last beacon: 1530ms ago

In the MEPIS Network Assistant, I have set the Interface Configuration Mode to both Manual and Automatic; enabled and disabled Ndiswrapper; and had the SSID as "any", "default", "00:16:B6:0C:C8:54", and blank. eth1 is set to start at boot, though the status reads "Was not started".

I also get the pop-up message, "Could not get information from HAL. The haldaemon is maybe not running."

This is my first laptop installation, and I've never dealt with wireless before, so the vocabulary and processes are all new and a little intimidating to me. It may be obvious that I don't really know what I'm doing. Can anybody make some suggestions?

[MikeTbob]

You really need to figure out why HAL isn't working, but also, set your ESSID to "ABAWireless" and be sure to use TKIP instead of WEP. You also shouldn't need NDISWrapper, this card uses a different module.

[frisco]

You really need to figure out why HAL isn't working, but also, set your ESSID to "ABAWireless" and be sure to use TKIP instead of WEP. You also shouldn't need NDISWrapper, this card uses a different module.

I'm having the same problem with the same software on the same machine.

I noticed that the settings you recommend are there in that above post, posted as the result of "The output of iwlist eth1 scan is:"

Maybe you didn't notice.

Any other ideas as to how to get it going?

- Frisco

[MikeTbob]

Hiya Frisco, welcome to the forums.
First of all, you really should start your own thread as you'll be more likely to get some timely responses. Be sure to include as much info as possible and things like are you getting an error with hald or hal daemon? Could you post that error msg please?
Which Card are you using? What steps have you taken?