Laptops :: No Battery indicator on Dell laptop



doobit -

D-Link Air DWL-650 - Chipset: Realtek 8180.

This card works with minimal trouble using the earilier kernels with DSL 1.5 and 2.2 but I run into trouble with the 2.4.31 kernel DSL 2.0 and 2.1(x).  What I have notice with the older kernels is that the card is assigned to eth0 interface and in the more recent kernels it assigned wlan0.  Things I have tried.

I downloaded the driver listed on the D-Link site and expanded it but there was not a <xxxx>.inf driver so I was not able to try using ndiswrapper with it.  The most progress I have made is using the Prism2 tool from the DSL control panel.  You can actually see some valid data (MAC address) with ifconfig -a for the wlan0 interface.  However, I think that I run into problems when I attempt to execute iwconfig wlan0 essid <my_sid>.  It says something like invalid operation or operation is not supported.  So I am wondering if it might not like my choice of sid (althought this same sid works with interface eth0) or perhaps it does not like the wlan0 arguement.  If you have any ideas let me know.  Thanks.
If it worked on the earlier kernel you're in business because 2.2 went back to the 2.4.26 kernel.
clivesay - yes you are right the wireless card works with 2.2 but not the battery indicator.  So I can go to 2.2 with my wireless card but no battery indicator or go to 2.1b with the cool battery indicator but the wireless card does not work.  Well, maybe I am just getting greedy. You know DSL is great, so I am not complaining, just trying to get most I can out it.
There is a great post about a battery indicator script here:

http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....4;st=10

Also, someone here posted, with some desperation, that they would pay to get their Realtek based card working in DSL, so please post the details of how you did it in the networking forum. :D
Bingo - I got the D-Link DWL-650 card working with DSL 2.1b.  I believe there might be a problem with the script /usr/local/bin/prism2.sh. The lines that read

wlanctl-ng "$1" lnxreq_wlansniff enable=false channel "$2"

wlanctl-ng "$1" p2req_channel_info_results channel "$2"

should read
wlanctl-ng "$1" lnxreq_wlansniff enable=false channel="$2"

wlanctl-ng "$1" p2req_channel_info_results channel="$2"

I believe the '=' sign is the correct syntax but I should test this idea some more.  I noticed walking through the script one line at a time that the channel does not get assigned without the '=' sign being there.  In addition to this issue, the line wlanctl-ng "$1" dot11req_mibset mibattribute=dot11WEPDefaultKey0="$4" requires the encryption key to be formated as "NN:NN:NN:NN:NN"  ( the ':' is required between each two hex numbers ).  Once I made these changes the pump -i wlan0 was successful and I could obtain an IP with dhcp.  I will repeat this test and document it in the appropriate forum.

If someone else would like to confirm (or refute) the syntax error that would be helpful.
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