[KLUG Members] Wireless net card

[Nikolas Reist]

Which distro is this?  If it's Gutsy Gibbon, then the wireless support
is very shaky.  I had to use an atheros based card in order to get
wireless at all (madwifi).  This is a known issue and is fixed in git.
Since the bulk of development is in Hardy now, there may not be much
hope for support.  I haven't tried using a different card since updating
the kernel, but from what I have researched through various forums and
articles, the problem is with the kernel version that comes with Gutsy,
and you may need to compile a custom kernel in order to get things to
work right.  Also, there are several other distros affected by this, so
it isn't specific to Ubuntu.  When I run the following the command:

uname -r

I get this result:

2.6.22-14-generic

which is the source of the problem.  If you pulled the latest kernel and
compiled it, you may have better luck but you also may have to rebuild
wpa_supplicant and other wireless related packages.  Atheros cards are
the only ones I could find that had support out of the box.  If you do
this:

lspci

and find the entry for your wireless card it will help you to determine
what the source of the issue is.  Intel cards work good (i.e. ipw2945 or
some other model) but the cards that don't work well are listed below:

rt2x00
rtx1
rtl8xxx
any marvell wireless chips
bcm43xx (might work with fw_cutter installed and current firmware image
but I haven't tested)

I couldn't even get these to work with ndiswrapper, so I am not sure if
it's because I am running x86_64 or if it's an issue with ndiswrapper
itself, but the ubuntuforums has numerous posts of people not being able
to get these to work.  I hope Hardy or the new LTS is much more stable.

Nik

On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 15:03 -0400, Seth Kramer wrote:
> Does it connect to open networks and just not your secure one? 
> 
> BTW if possible I'd consider changing to a WPA, or better yet WPA2
> key.
> Here's an article from ComputerWorld explaining:
> http://tinyurl.com/35h7xk
> 
> Seth
> 
> 
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 10:13 PM, Joe McLaughlin
> <jmclaug-linux at chartermi.net> wrote:
>         I just bougth a Toshiba laptop.
>         I can't get the sound to work - or the built in netcard.
>         
>         I bought a usb net card - the machince sees wlan0 & wmaster0
>         I think I have wep key on my wireless router.
>         But the cpu does not connect to the router!
>         any ideas
>         
>         Joe
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