wicd (wireless) utility not working in installed version

Swarup · posted: 2008-05-15 19:03

When I booted to the livecd, the wicd was draining 50% of the cpu, but it recognized my Netgear dongle and KR1 wireless router, and went right on line. Worked out of the box.

Now I've installed it (M7.2) to the HD. When I boot to it, everything goes fine. But as soon as I open wicd, it begins using 100% of the cpu, the fan comes on, and the wicd utility does not work or even hardly respond at all. Even if the Netgear wg111v2 dongle is plugged in, wicd says there are no wireless networks. Or sometimes when I open wicd, it just remains blank. And wicd is just about frozen, with most of the tabs either totally unresponsive, or giving some sign after much delay. But I've tried opening and closing wicd (I had to kill it) several times, and also tried rebooting. Nothing seems to help. Even if the dongle isn't plugged in, as soon as wicd opens, the cpu goes up to 100% and wicd becomes basically unresponsive.

How can I get this fixed? My ability to use this OS and keep it on the HD depends on its being able to get online. Other than this issue, I am totally loving antiX. So I really hope this can be solved. __{{emoticon}}__

anticapitalista · 15 May 2008, 23:31 #2 2008-05-15 23:31

It is very very late here so all I can suggest at the moment is to try and connect to your wireless using 2 alternatives to wicd.
1. mnetwork
2. ceniwrapper

Both can be opened via a terminal, the first as root user.

Maybe/hopefully this will get you online wireless.

I'll post again tomorrow.

Swarup · posted: 2008-05-16 05:44

anticapitalista wrote:[...]try and connect to your wireless using 2 alternatives to wicd.
1. mnetwork
2. ceniwrapper

I tried with both. Ceniwrapper just said there were no networks available, so that was the end of that. It didn't seem to detect either the Netgear dongle or the KR1 router. Mnetwork gave me a more standard series of windows in which either to put all the static IP info, or to select the DHCP. I tried both, but neither did anything. Every time I would enter the data and then click"apply", all the info I had entered would immediately and instantly vanish. So I couldn't tell whether mnetwork was accepting the info I gave and trying to use it, or just trashing it as soon as I had entered it. Anyhow, neither seemed to work.

1. If one of these tools would allow me to choose ndiswrapper and point it to the Win98 .inf file which I usually use in Ubuntu, perhaps that would work.

2. When I booted up to the AntiX livecd, it jumped right on line using wicd. If there is a way to find out which driver wicd used/uses when I boot up to the livecd, perhaps we could apply that success over to the installed version of AntiX which is having so much difficulty linking with my dongle and its router.

add: I have always found in Ubuntu that to get the NDISwrapper to work with my Win98 driver file, I need to remove and blacklist the default driver rtl8187 which is very persistent and otherwise insists on loading to the exlusion of ndiswrapper. And this was the case with Tinyflux as well. So I could try removing it also in AntiX and then see if ndiswrapper will work. Is the ndiswrapper utility already present in AntiX so I don't need to download it? Or do I have to get that as well.

Jerry · posted: 2008-05-16 13:39

Could you please open a terminal, become root, and enter these commands one at a time:

Code: Select all

iwconfig
ndiswrapper -l
lsusb

Then paste the results back here so we can take a look? Thanks.

We should be able to get you up and running pretty quickly.

Swarup · posted: 2008-05-16 14:52

Hey, thanks. Sure I'll do it. First though I need to resolve the grub boot problem that developed last night (see it here:
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"antix.freeforu ms.org/how-to-manually-partition-hd-so-that-data-is-separate-partit-t701-15.html#3961"
linktext was:"antix.freeforu ms.org/how-to-manu ... .html#3961"
====================================
). As soon as I can boot into AntiX again, I'll do what you've requested here. And also, please see what I've just added to my post here just above yours, about needing to blacklist and/or remove the default rtl8187 driver in other OS's in which I use this dongle.

DJiNN · posted: 2008-05-16 22:15

I had a problem with wicd not working as well. It would see the wifi network but apparently there was no"lease" offered (or something like that) so it wouldn't connect. This is on my laptop that has the ipw3945 firmware. It worked in my previous install of antiX so i know it's OK.

I fired up the Mepis net app (as anti said) and that did the trick. All now working fine, although i don't know what the problem is with wicd.

Swarup · posted: 2008-05-18 01:49

Jerry wrote:Could you please open a terminal, become root, and enter these commands one at a time:
Code: Select all
iwconfig
ndiswrapper -l
lsusb
Then paste the results back here so we can take a look? Thanks.

We should be able to get you up and running pretty quickly.

I got the grub problem resolved today, and so booted up into AntiX and went to run your above requests. I hadn't seen them for a day, and only had one committed to memory: ndiswrapper -l. So that one I did. The other two I'll run in a bit now that they're again fresh in my mind. But first you must tell me one thing: how do you copy and paste text from terminal in AntiX? In Ubuntu, it is done with shift-ctrl-c and shift-ctrl-v. Also in Ubuntu, at the top of any terminal screen there is an edit drop-down menu with copy and paste functions on it. But in AntiX's terminal window neither did the shortcuts work, and nor was there a drop-down menu. I also tried just ctrl-c and ctrl-v, but that didn't work either.

Anyhow, I wrote out long-hand the below results for you:

After doing"su" and password entry--

Code: Select all

ndiswrapper -l
airplus: driver installed
bcmw15: driver installed
bcmw15a: driver installed
lsbcmnds6: driver installed
lstinds: driver installed
mrv8k51: driver installed
net8185: driver installed
netr33x: driver installed
prismnic: driver installed
wlannic: driver installed
wlanvig: driver installed
wlipnds: driver installed

I'm surprised that the rtl8187 driver was not listed. That is the driver I've most often seen used as a default for the Netgear wg111v2 dongle which I use. It was there in Ubuntu, as well as in Tinyflux. In both of those, once I did rmmod of the rtl8187 (or r8187) driver and blacklisted it, then I was able to install ndiswrapper and it worked fine.

Please tell me the copy and paste functions in terminal, so I can paste the results on my flashdrive for you.

masinick · posted: 2008-05-18 02:27

DJiNN wrote:I had a problem with wicd not working as well. It would see the wifi network but apparently there was no"lease" offered (or something like that) so it wouldn't connect. This is on my laptop that has the ipw3945 firmware. It worked in my previous install of antiX so i know it's OK.

I fired up the Mepis net app (as anti said) and that did the trick. All now working fine, although i don't know what the problem is with wicd.

I had a similar experience. I have a brand new Lenovo 3000 Model Y410 laptop, which also uses the Intel Pro Wireless 3945 that you mention. When I first tried networking, I was attempting to use the ceni interface. Being familiar with it from sidux, I expected to see a wired and wireless card, select the wireless card (eth1), then select the SSID (TheMasNET) and then authenticate. I was not seeing anything at all.

However, as soon as I used mnetwork instead and stopped all services, I was then able to use any of {ceni,mnetwork,wicd} - they ALL worked at that point, which made me quite happy.

Had not previously encountered ANY networking issues with this, including M7.2, which I had previously gotten going on the Dell Dimension 4100 with a Realtek 8139 Ethernet card and a Dell Latitude D600 with an Intel Pro Wireless 2200 wireless network card.

After using mnetwork, I could get everything going with the ipw3945. Speculating that the reasons may be that:

1. I disabled ndiswrapper with mnetwork.
2. I turned off the network connection.

Once I did that, ceni was then able to display the network interfaces and wicd also appeared to work as well.

Swarup · posted: 2008-05-18 02:43

I went ahead and did the two remaining commands, writing them out long-hand so you'll have them.
In terminal -> root ->

Code: Select all

lsusb
Bus 001 Device 002:ID 0846:6a00  NetGear, Inc. WG111 WiFi (v2)

iwconfig
lo  no wireless extensions
wmaster0  no wireless extensions
wlan0   IEEE  802.11g  ESSID:""
            Mode: managed   Channel 1:0   Access Point: Not - Associated
            Retry min limit: 7   RTS thr: off   Fragment thr: 2346B
            Link Quality: 0   Signal Level: 0   Noise Level: 0

There were a couple more lines of info for wlan0, but all the values were"0", and it didn't seem so relevant so I didn't copy it. Hope the above helps. (The"ndiswrapper -l" is given in my previous post above.)

Please also kindly let me know what the copy and paste commands are in AntiX terminal.

anticapitalista · posted: 2008-05-18 07:59

To copy/paste from a terminal, drag mouse over the text to highlight and middle mouse click into the text file.
If you don't have a middle button, you have to left and right click at the same time.

Or use roxterm. It is installed.

Jerry · posted: 2008-05-18 12:33

Swarup, please try what masinick is recommending:
1) Open up a terminal as root and type: mnetwork
2) On the General tab: disable ndiswrapper and switch to manual configuration mode.
3) On the same tab, click Stop network, then Re/Start network.
---
4) If you are not connected, then click on the Interfaces tab, see which interface it tried to start. Let's assume it was eth0 for the rest of this discussion
5) Exit mnetwork, and still in a root terminal type

Code: Select all

ifdown -a

6) Then type:

Code: Select all

iwconfig eth0 ESSID"NameOfNetwork"
ifup eth0
dhclient eth0

Let us know how that goes.

Jerry · posted: 2008-05-18 12:34

Swarup, please try what masinick is recommending:
1) Open up a terminal as root and type: mnetwork
2) On the General tab: disable ndiswrapper and switch to manual configuration mode.
3) On the same tab, click Stop network, then Re/Start network.
---
4) If you are not connected, then click on the Interfaces tab, see which interface it tried to start. Let's assume it was eth0 for the rest of this discussion
5) Exit mnetwork, and still in a root terminal type

Code: Select all

ifdown -a

6) Then type:

Code: Select all

iwconfig eth0 ESSID"NameOfNetwork"
ifup eth0
dhclient eth0

Let us know how that goes.

Urban · posted: 2008-05-18 21:52

For some reason I had to use the"mean" kernel flag. Not sure why. Maybe I should try it without again.

Swarup · posted: 2008-05-19 12:08

Jerry wrote:Swarup, please try what masinick is recommending:
1) Open up a terminal as root and type: mnetwork
2) On the General tab: disable ndiswrapper and switch to manual configuration mode.
3) On the same tab, click Stop network, then Re/Start network.

That didn't work.

Jerry wrote:4) If you are not connected, then click on the Interfaces tab, see which interface it tried to start. Let's assume it was eth0 for the rest of this discussion
5) Exit mnetwork, and still in a root terminal type
Code: Select all
ifdown -a
6) Then type:
Code: Select all
iwconfig eth0 ESSID"NameOfNetwork"
ifup eth0
dhclient eth0
Let us know how that goes.

I did the above, substituting"wlan0" for"eth0" wherever it appears, because my connection was of that type in the interfaces tab in mnetworkis , and it is always of type wlan0 in any OS I use.

And do you know what? It went on line. I am writing you from within antiX right now. BUT-- it is extremely slow. Like a dialup connection, or even slower. So I am not sure we've got the connection proper yet.

Here below is the terminal output from the commands I did above to get online, in case it may be of any value. Also: If you ARE feeling that the connection is proper, then please let me know what would be the technique in future for going on and off line. When I boot up, from now on will it go online automatically?

As I say though, at least right now the connection is unbearably slow. Going to the google page or doing a simple google search took like 20-30 seconds. And going to the Earthlink home page took over a minute. And moving around this forum is incredibly slow right now.

Here is the terminal output:

Code: Select all

swarup@Swarup:~$ su
Password: 
root@Swarup:/home/swarup# ifdown -a
root@Swarup:/home/swarup# iwconfig wlan0 ESSID"KR1"
root@Swarup:/home/swarup# ifup wlan0
Ignoring unknown interface wlan0=wlan0.
root@Swarup:/home/swarup# dhclient wlan0
There is already a pid file /var/run/dhclient.pid with pid 3100
killed old client process, removed PID file
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.1.0
Copyright 2004-2007 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/

wmaster0: unknown hardware address type 801
wmaster0: unknown hardware address type 801
Listening on LPF/wlan0/00:0f:b5:d4:59:90
Sending on   LPF/wlan0/00:0f:b5:d4:59:90
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 3
DHCPOFFER from 192.168.0.1
DHCPREQUEST on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPREQUEST on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
DHCPOFFER from 192.168.0.1
DHCPREQUEST on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK from 192.168.0.1
bound to 192.168.0.100 -- renewal in 36163 seconds.
root@Swarup:/home/swarup#

Above, it says"there is already a pid file...", likely because this was the second time I ran this sequence of commands. The first time, it was in the default terminal window of AntiX, and I could not copy and paste from there into here. So I ran it again in roxterminal, so I could copy from there into this window.

Is there an icon for on-line status, so I can easily check if I am online?

Jerry · posted: 2008-05-19 13:22

I will look at the question later when I have more time. For online status I use Conky: check your conkyrc file for the wireless code commented out right above the TEXT section. Here is how mine reads:

Code: Select all

${color white}Wireless:
   ${color green}essid: ${color white}${wireless_essid wlan0}
   ${color green}IP:${color white} ${addr wlan0}
   ${color green}link strength: ${color green} ${wireless_link_bar 7,50 wlan0}