The machine will be used by little kids, so I can't expect them to go doing these things manually after each reboot...

per the wiki, to get my wireless working I need to do:

modprobe -r p54pci ; modprobe p54pci
iwconfig
ifconfig wlan0 up
ceni

That gets it working, but how can I get it to come up again after a reboot without doing those steps.

I know how to edit files to edit lines in if I just knew which of the lines were needed in what file. It looks to me like the modprobe, iwconfig and ifconfig lines need to be run before it can get an IP address.

thanks

I set a command for my rt61-based wireless chip at the tail end of /etc/rc.local just make sure the commands are last.

Argh! It didn't work. I didn't get an IP address. Do I have to run ceni, too? I wonder if there is a way to not need to reconfigure it?

Also make sure ceni is set to hotplug or auto and not manual.

anticapitalista wrote:Also make sure ceni is set to hotplug or auto and not manual.

Thanks for the help, but I don't where to look or know how to do that?

When you run ceni, on the third 'page' , under"Class" you have a choice of 'allow-hotplug', 'auto' or 'manual'

thanks again for the help...

it was on allow-hotplug, so i changed it to auto.

then i rebooted

on the boot, it got a message
* Waiting for /dev to be fully populated...
p54pci 0000:06:0: Cannot find firmware (isl3886pci)

then it seems to lock up after DHCP client V3.1.3 about 15 lines later

sending on Socket/fallback

its locked up there, not sure what to do...

have you tried using wicd instead of ceni? Leave your ceni line out when you reboot and try setting up your wireless with wicd. If that works, wicd will remember your settings at your next reboot.

dolphin_oracle wrote:have you tried using wicd instead of ceni? Leave your ceni line out when you reboot and try setting up your wireless with wicd. If that works, wicd will remember your settings at your next reboot.

I don't know if I can use wicd or not. I did try it before I found the wiki but had no success with it.

Anyway, at this point I can't boot. Its locked up. I don't know how to get it back to being able to boot, other than a complete reload from scratch.

You'll have to hard reboot.
Use livecd to delete the contents of /etc/network interfaces (or delete the file and once booted again use ceni to make a new one)

anticapitalista wrote:You'll have to hard reboot.
Use livecd to delete the contents of /etc/network interfaces (or delete the file and once booted again use ceni to make a new one)

I am guessing that the hard disk is not mounted for some reason? not sure how to mount it. when i look at it via gparted it says the mount point is /mnt/hda1 but when i use mc to look there it is empty

Ok, for some reason, some screens allowed access to the hard drive, but mc didn't. Anyway, I edited it back to allow-hotplug for wlan0, so now I got it rebooted.

Oddly enough, it now works after reboot. I'm not sure what exactly fixed it, but its ok, now, thanks...