Hi,

I am new to Antix 8.0, albeit not new to Linux or Mepis.

I am very impressed with Antix 8.0: it's beautiful and very fast, even on my ancient HP laptop (433 MHz Celeron). However, I cannot for the life of me get wireless working.

I have a PCMCIA Netgear MA401 (Rev. D) card. It is recognized perfectly under"standard" Mepis 8.0 (also under Puppy and other distros). I think it's supposed to use the hostap kernel driver.

Anyway, mnetwork doesn't see any wireless access points no matter what I do, nor does it see the card under Hardware.

ceni, on the other hand, does see the card, but doesn't any wireless networks, either.

Okay, folks, fire away! __{{emoticon}}__

In chat you thought it was an atheros chip but I think it might be an orinoco chip and use the orinoco_cs module. With the card inserted do: and post the output. You may want to search synaptic if you can get on line otherwise and search for pcmia_utils(or something similar), it may help out.

eriefisher wrote:In chat you thought it was an atheros chip but I think it might be an orinoco chip and use the orinoco_cs module. With the card inserted do:

Code: Select all

lspci

and post the output. You may want to search synaptic if you can get on line otherwise and search for pcmia_utils(or something similar), it may help out.

It turns out that my Netgear PCMCIA MA401 wireless card uses the Prism chipset (as per this web site:
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://linux-wless.passys.nl/query_part.php?brandname=Netgear"
linktext was:"http://linux-wless.passys.nl/query_part ... me=Netgear"
====================================
). I think I was confused earlier... I used to have another card that used Atheros, but this one is Prism.

Under Antix, the interface is identified as"wlan0." (Under regular Mepis 8.0, it's identified, oddly, as eth0.) Under Antix, in Mepis Network Assistant/Interfaces, wlan0's status is always"Was not started." If I click on Start/restart on Apply, it still remains"not started."

Under Mepis, when I boot from the live CD, the card comes up with a solid LED. It blinks when I enter the network info in Network Assistant and click on Restart, but then goes to a solid light once it's connected. Under Antix, the LED comes up blinking and stays that way no matter what.

Under both Mepis and Antix, lspci does not show the network card, which is very weird, since it works under Mepis!

Wicd under Antix (called from Antix control center) does not show any networks.

Under ceni in Antix, the network interface is listed under Hardware interfaces. The listing reads:

wlan0 wireless 00:09:5b:4a:d6:12 hostap_cs NETGEAR MA401RA Wireless PC C$

But selecting the interface and scanning for networks under ceni yields"no values."

One other tidbit: under the Hardware tab of Antix Control Center, there's a module called"Manage Hardware." As of now, for some reason, I cannot get that module to work... Control Center just quits when I try to use it. But I'd swear that I'd gotten it to work earlier, and when I selected the Network Card, it showed the card as (I think)"disabled," with a red circle with an X in it... for whatever that's worth...

Okay, what do you think?

When you boot livecd, which grub menu option do you choose? The default one?

anticapitalista wrote:When you boot livecd, which grub menu option do you choose? The default one?

Yes, the default.

rebbi2,

Seems as though there are too many glitches with the anitX 8.0, so have you checked the md5sum? A bad burn can give many anomalies, if that is good then we need to proceed through some logical steps to get your wireless working. If it works in Mepis 8.0 it will work in antiX 8.0.
First post the output of:
iwconfig
then:
lspci
and then we will go from there.

cheers,
oldhoghead

oldhoghead wrote:rebbi2,

Seems as though there are too many glitches with the anitX 8.0, so have you checked the md5sum? A bad burn can give many anomalies, if that is good then we need to proceed through some logical steps to get your wireless working. If it works in Mepis 8.0 it will work in antiX 8.0.
First post the output of:
iwconfig
then:
lspci
and then we will go from there.

cheers,
oldhoghead

Okay, the MD5 sum checks out, so no file corruption there.

Here's the output of iwconfig:

lo no wireless extensions.

wifi0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"test" Nickname:""
Mode: Master Frequency:2.422 GHz Access Point: 00:09:5B:4A:D6:12
Bit Rate: 11 MB/s Sensitivity=1/3
Retry short limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off

wlan0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"test" Nickname:""
Mode: Master Frequency:2.422 GHz Access Point: 00:09:5B:4A:D6:12
Bit Rate: 11 MB/s Sensitivity=1/3
Retry short limit:8 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 Rxinvalid crypt:1 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:15 Missed beacon:0

Output of lspci:

Since I can't get the laptop in question online (it has no Ethernet port!) I can't just cut and paste all the lspci output here, and it's an awful lot to retype. Suffice it to say the lspci does not see my networking card. It does see the two Texas Instruments cardbus bridges. And as the laptop boots and the Linux boot text scrolls down the screen with the CD in the drive, it sees that there's a card in PCMCIA slot 0.

Okay, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. What do you think??

ok,

so the card is recognized, but not getting initialized:
go to terminal or konsole:
sux
input your root pword
then type:

ifdown wifi0
ifdown wlan0
then
ifup wlan0

hopefully that will get you connected. If not then we will take a look at some other options.

edit: just noticed that you have two different wireless interfaces wifi0 and wlan0. So, at some point wifi0 in network interfaces was chosen, so I edited my post to put that interface down.

cheers
oldhoghead

oldhoghead wrote:ok,

so the card is recognized, but not getting initialized:
go to terminal or konsole:
sux
input your root pword
then type:

ifdown wifi0
ifdown wlan0
then
ifup wlan0

hopefully that will get you connected. If not then we will take a look at some other options.

edit: just noticed that you have two different wireless interfaces wifi0 and wlan0. So, at some point wifi0 in network interfaces was chosen, so I edited my post to put that interface down.

cheers
oldhoghead

Okay...

The command"ifdown wifi0" returns"interface wifi0 not configured"
The command"ifdown wlan0" returns"interface wlan0 not configured"
The command"ifup wlan0" returns"Ignoring unknown interface wlan0=wlan0"

What now?

Does, as root in a terminal,

dhclient wlan0

do anything?

anticapitalista wrote:Does, as root in a terminal,

dhclient wlan0

do anything?

Here's the output:

wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
Listening on LPF/wlan0/00:09:5b:4a:d6:12
Sending on LPF/wlan0/00:09:5b:4a:d6:12
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 9
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 10
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 18
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 17
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

While trying to find out about this card a few things popped up. It seems you need hostap-utils and I would also install pcmciautils. Both are available from the repos.

eriefisher wrote:While trying to find out about this card a few things popped up. It seems you need hostap-utils and I would also install pcmciautils. Both are available from the repos.

Thanks to all of you for all the help, but I think I'm out of patience and time on this one. I have no idea why this card would work flawlessly under Mepis and not under Antix. But today I tried plugging in a different, Atheros-based (D-Link) card into the PCMCIA slot and it worked perfectly. So I'm just gonna save time and aggravation and get myself another card.

By the way, since this laptop has no USB port, I'm wondering how well (if at all) Antix/Linux might support PCMCIA USB port cards.

By the way, since this laptop has no USB port, I'm wondering how well (if at all) Antix/Linux might support PCMCIA USB port cards.

Care to be the guinea-pig? __{{emoticon}}__

But today I tried plugging in a different, Atheros-based (D-Link) card into the PCMCIA slot and it worked perfectly. So I'm just gonna save time and aggravation and get myself another card.

Sorry we couldn't get the other one to work. I would really like to know why it won't work though.

Still time to enjoy antiX!

anticapitalista wrote:

By the way, since this laptop has no USB port, I'm wondering how well (if at all) Antix/Linux might support PCMCIA USB port cards.

Care to be the guinea-pig? __{{emoticon}}__

But today I tried plugging in a different, Atheros-based (D-Link) card into the PCMCIA slot and it worked perfectly. So I'm just gonna save time and aggravation and get myself another card.

Sorry we couldn't get the other one to work. I would really like to know why it won't work though.

Still time to enjoy antiX!

I picked up a new, D-Link wireless G card yesterday, and it also uses an Atheros chipset and works perfectly, so I'm set.

By the way, how do you get your wireless settings to be persistent from session to session? I seem to have to reenter my WEP key each time I boot up.