Another Wireless Crash.

Forum: Networking
Topic: Another Wireless Crash.
started by: daklander

Posted by daklander on Dec. 11 2005,20:26

I believe I've isolated the complete lockup problem I posted in the "Other" thread. This lockup is both keyboard and mouse. It occurs when The wirless card is activated through ndiswrapper and usually was far enough off to add uncertainty but today it locks within a minute or so, and most of the time immediately.
It a Motorola card with the a broadcom chip. Driver is bcmwl5.inf.
Athlon K-6 350 with 196mb ram.
I cannot get the thing activated running live cd though I input all addressing options to the file.

Posted by petie on Dec. 12 2005,21:05

[/QUOTE]

I am having the same problems with my Buffalo card. (Uses the same ndiswrapper driver: bcmwl5.inf) I have had this same problem with SLAX and ndiswrapper, but SLAX 5.0.5 works great, and wanted to go back to DSL.

Does anyone have any ideas.

Posted by cbagger01 on Dec. 13 2005,17:55

Try boot with:

dsl acpi=off

and see if it helps.

Posted by petie on Dec. 15 2005,13:42

I tried dsl acpi=off, and I thought that did the trick...

Here's what I did:

Booted DSL, and typed dsl acpi=off at the boot prompt

open'd a terminal window and installed the wireless driver

sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -l
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

everything was going great, then i tried to get an IP through dhcp and typed:

pump -i wlan0

then the system locked (i thought it might be using all the resources so I let it sit for about 15min and it was still locked.)

I then reboot'd entered the same boot command, and loaded the ndiswrapper module the same, but this time used the control panel and tried netcardconfig. I selected DHCP, and it stated that wlan0 connected DHCP "OK" and then locked up.

I then reboot'd entered the same boot command, and loaded the ndiswrapper module the same, but this time tried firefox. and after the window opened, the second light on the card came on and then the system locked up.

tonight I will try another card, just to make sure it is the Buffalo Airstation card and/or driver that is causing the problems.

Slax works with the same driver, and Slax uses DHCPCD... it there a DHCPCD version for DSL?

Posted by cbagger01 on Dec. 15 2005,18:13

If the machine locked after firefox opened, then the problem must be with your card's ndiswrapper driver or the pcmcia card services and it is not due to your DHCP program (pump vs. dhcpcd).

You might be able to get it to work with a different driver file. Are you using the one recommended by the ndiswrapper folks?

< http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/List >

Posted by daklander on Dec. 18 2005,03:38

Quote (cbagger01 @ Dec. 15 2005,13:13)

Well, I used the recommended driver and still had a lockup, immediately upon connection. I didn't even have to try fire up a browser these last times.
I installed a spare card, an Airlink that is detected with Mepis but I can't get going with ndiswrapper. I will try the recommended driver for that one later this weekend and see if I can get it going.
I can get wireless going with other distros but they are too darned slow on this old machine. Windows is much quicker but I don't want to run Windows I want to run DSL because of the usability on that old box. It's about the same speed as Windows but it won't do me any good if I can't get wireless going.

The Broadcom card using the recommended driver locks up the same with Mepis so it's not a DSL problem per-se, but as best I know, a Debian issue.

Posted by MinatureMe on Dec. 20 2005,10:15

Hi, I have also had lockup/freeze with my wireless card using ndiswrapper on DSL 2.0. It was happening while I used the Dillo browser, after sucessful wireless connection.

I solved the problem last night by installing DSL version 1.3, which had been working previously. I was then able to use both Dillo and Firefox to surf the web wirelessly without problem. This seems to suggest that the issue may lie with the newer version of ndiswrapper which I think was upgraded in DSL version 2.0.

I am curious to know if this might solve your problem. Another question: would it be possible to install version 2.0 and 'downgrade' ndiswrapper. Maybe this is possible and would work.

I am using an IBM thinkpad notebook, 150Mhz, 32 Mb ram, and MSI wireless 11b MS 6802.

Incidently on the other end of the network, I set up a 'live' router using Ubuntu, after coming across the following article: < http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/2483 > (They refer to Knoppix rather than Ubuntu).

Posted by importmastr on Dec. 20 2005,12:24

Strangely enough I was having this same problem while using a AMD K6 II 266Mhz laptop with a Hawking PCMCIA 802.11 a/b/g card. This card works fine in my other laptops, but not this one. The problem seemed to come up no matter what OS I installed. I tried DSL, Puppy, Vector, and even various Winblows OS's. Finally I gave up, and decide I would use that card in a PIII laptop instead, and put the PIII's Cisco Aironet 340 in the K6 II 266 laptop. About a month later I needed the Aironet 340 for something else so I tried the Hawking card once more, and it worked fine, this time running Winblows 2000. To make a long story long, I figured out that in Winblows it will work everytime in PCMCIA slot 0, but never in slot 1. Any other OS I tried it won't work in either slot. I have tried all the usual stuff that I have found in this thread. I ultimately decided I couldn't live with Winblows, so I ebayed the Hawking card. I got a few nickles for it, and threw in a couple more bucks, and got a 2 wire version of the Orinoco. So far so good.