Networking :: Wireless Access with DSL



I'm having great fun and a much trouble getting wireless to work on DSL! I've 3 separate machines:

1. HP desk top Celeron with DLink DWL-520+ PCI card
2. HP Laptop, Intel Centrino
3. Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook, also Intel Centrino
All connected to a DLink Wireless ADSL router.

All work under Windows XP (sorry, but fact!).

2. & 3. work under Knoppix (CD version 10) using the KWiFiManager. 1. doesn't.

None work under DSL.

Using the DSL Control Panel, I've tried to connect to the router with the following results on all machines:

wlanconfig: No wireless network found

Ndiswrapper (using wlan0, channel, SSID, WEP set as for the router): connection failed. This tried only on 1. as I'm not sure where the drivers exist for the Centrino machines.

iwconfig (eth0, other settings as per router): Connection failed

prism2 (wlan0, other settings as per router): system hangs on all machines.


As I appear to have the same problems on all machines, I must be doing something, or not doing something, really obvious, but as a keen, but very new, Linux and DSL user, I don't know what to try next. My intention is to have the older HP desktop (1.) just running DSL for browsing and normal use as it's very slow under Windows and has been attacked on numerous occasions by viruses. DSL appears perfect: small, effective, reliable, but it's useless unless I can get a wireless internet connection running.

Any help greatly appreciated! Please be very specific if I need to use the Konsole as it's all new to me! On the plus side, if you can teach me, you can teach anyone!

Many thanks.
Please tell us what version of DSL you are using. Secondly, on your laptops, if you do lsmod in a terminal, what is listed?
Sorry, should have stated the version: DSL-2.0RC1. I originally tried DSL-1.5 with the same results so tried 2.0RC1 as I noticed it had some updates to the WLAN packages.

lsmod lists a lot of details - is there anything specific I should show? I cannot copy & paste from Bash into FLWriter & save the file which I could then paste here. Is there an easy way of getting the bash output of lsmod into a file? Because I have no internet connection under DSL, I have to reboot into Windows & transfer anything via a USB key.

Thanks again!
If you do su lsmod >/home/dsl/lsmod.txt it will output a text file to your /home/dsl/ directory that you can edit, and copy and past in Beaver or FLwriter.
DSL-2.0RC1 has some differences in the wireless drivers configurations as already reported here by some. I'm using DSL-1.5 successfully wth an Atheros based wireless PCMCIA that is not recognized yet in 2.0RC2, but I'm sure the developers will sort that one out before final release.
Also, did you check the wiki concerning wireless cards that are known to work? I don't know much about the centrino, but it's popular, so I would think something in DSL would make it work somehow. You might also start a separate thread with that question in the subject line once you know exactly what you need to run it.
Also, in another, similar thread, it was suggested to run knoppix with an open terminal so you can see what wireless drivers are loaded, then see if the same is available for DSL.
OK, the lsmod works, thanks for that - here is the output, generated from an HP Pavilion notebook with Centrino (system 2. in my first post):

dsl@box:~$ lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by    Not tainted
af_packet              13608   0 (autoclean)
efs                     7436   0 (autoclean)
hfs                    77248   0 (autoclean)
minix                  19816   0 (autoclean)
xfs                   507012   0 (autoclean)
reiserfs              169584   0 (autoclean)
ext3                   64388   0 (autoclean)
jbd                    46804   0 (autoclean)  [ext3]
ntfs                   50944   0 (autoclean)
msdos                   4684   0 (autoclean)
nls_iso8859-1           2844   2 (autoclean)
nls_cp437               4348   1 (autoclean)
i810_audio             25176   1
ac97_codec             12140   0 [i810_audio]
soundcore               3428   2 [i810_audio]
8139too                13800   0
mii                     2240   0 [8139too]
crc32                   2816   0 [8139too]
serial                 52228   0 (autoclean)
ohci1394               22888   0 (unused)
ieee1394              183300   0 [ohci1394]
mousedev                3832   1
hid                    22788   0 (unused)
input                   3168   0 [mousedev hid]
ds                      6536   1
yenta_socket            9700   1
pcmcia_core            39840   0 [ds yenta_socket]
ide-cd                 28768   0
rtc                     7036   0 (autoclean)
cloop                  39204   2
usb-storage            61952   1
usb-uhci               21516   0 (unused)
usbcore                58016   1 [hid usb-storage usb-uhci]
ide-scsi                9040   0
dsl@box:~$

I'll default back to 1.5 until I can solve the issue so it doesn't introduce any more unknowns.

I did check the wiki - the Dlink 520+ does seem a bit of problem and I cannot get that working under Knoppix either, but the Centrino ought to be fairly common & it works fine with Knoppix, configured under the KWiFiManager. I'll dump the DLink 520+ for another card if that proves to be the problem, but the fact that I couldn't get any of them to run made me think the problem was closer to the operator than the hardware/software!

Thanks again.
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