Hello!

I've been using antiX on and off for some time, and recently I decided to try the newest release. I have a Zyxel M102 PCMCIA card in an old Dell Inspiron 5000 laptop. I use ndiswrapper to load the Windows drivers and generally after doing the typical stuff, it works fine. For some reason, doing it in this release, when going into the MEPIS Network Assistant, it says that the device (wlan0) was not started. The strange thing is, after installing the drivers via ndiswrapper, my card is powering up and blinking, though something must not be working properly as it's not detected. I'm a Linux novice, so any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance. __{{emoticon}}__

Can you please post the results of posting these commands one at a time as root: Thanks.

Sure!

lspci|grep network has no output.

ndiswrapper -l shows:
net5513 : driver installed
device (168C:0020) present

(I removed the other drivers from ndiswrapper, maybe I caused a problem by doing that?)

iwconfig shows:

lo no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate: 108 Mb/s
Encryption key: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:0 Missed beacon:0

The command is actually:

lspci<space>|<space>grep network

The card seem to up and working though. In a terminal try"dhclient" and see if it will grab an address.

Oh, first thing I would do is to try wicd to set up your connection.

Thanks, eriefisher, I swear those spaces were there...

@aker: does your wireless system have a name? If yes, use mnetwork to identify it on the Wireless tab, or open a terminal and become root, then type: Wicd might handle this too.

Hey guys,

I did the lspci | grep network command but still no output.

Doing dhclient basically ended up saying no DHCPOFFERS received.

I did define all of my network settings in mnetwork, but I went ahead and did the iwconfig with the correct ESSID. Wicd does not function for me, when I try to load it, it just hangs.

Thanks again!

1) Well first let's check on your card. Try just and look for the card, then paste the relevant section back here.

2) In such cases, I usually go strictly command line: If that works, wicd should be able to pick up at the next boot.

Just doing lspci lists a:

06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5513 802.11abg Wireless NIC (rev 01)

Doing the iwconfig seems to work fine, but when I type ifdown wlan0 I get:

ifdown: interface wlan0 not configured

Typing ifup wlan0 I get:

Ignoring unknown interface wlan0=wlan0.

OK, now we are on firmer footing--thanks.

Check out this page in the MEPIS Wiki. I'm hoping that it will just work if you 1) install madwifi-modules, 2) remove the Windows driver (ndiswrapper -e net5513), and 3) follow the other directions there.

Keep us posted!

Hi Jerry,

That link of yours didn't seem to work properly, but I'm guessing it's"Atheros-based wireless devices". It's a little difficult to work on this laptop because it has no connection to the internet aside from the wireless PCMCIA card. Last I was aware of, MadWifi wouldn't work with my device because it uses an Atheros AR5005VL chipset. Not sure what that means, but while an AR5005 of another type may be supported, the VL doesn't seem to be. Let me know if that's the right link, and if so, I guess I have to figure out how to do it on another computer first so I can copy it over!

Sorry my paste didn't work, but you guessed it correctly anyway.