Help w/Buffalo card on Dell Inspiron 3800

Forum: Networking
Topic: Help w/Buffalo card on Dell Inspiron 3800
started by: hermes3000

Posted by hermes3000 on Aug. 01 2006,18:26

I installed DSL on the HD of a Dell Inspiron 600mHz/64MB with no problems.

I'm using a Buffalo wireless card, WLI2-CB-G54L
PCI ID 17FE:2220

According to this page:

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

the driver found here:

< ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/noteboo....802.zip >

should work.

I copied all of the files in the winxp directory of the directory I got from acer here:

/home/dsl/driver

When I boot I see the message:

PMCIA found, starting cardmgr

The card powers up. I am at a university with an unencrypted network (authentication happens in a browser after the wireless connection is made) that I am able to use on an iBook running Ubuntu.

cardmgr version is 3.2.2
DSL version is 2.4.26

Netcardconfig asks "Use DHCP broadcast?". I hit yes.
It says "sending DHCP broadcast from device wlan0" then
"Failed. Hit return to exit." The "link" light is active during this process.
Tried again and chose "no." Clicked through default IP addresses that appeared in succeeding screens. Got a message that ended in "up."

Then it goes into "configuration of wireless parameters for wlan0". Since the output of iwconfig includes

ESSID:off/any

I leave that blank; same for NWID, mode, channel number, frequency, encryption key, additional parameters, since I don't know what to put. This process concludes with "done".

For Ndiswrapper setup, I put the path to the inf file like this:

/home/dsl/driver/neti2220.inf

Device shows up as wlan0 and I leave that alone.
I leave sid and wep blank. During the setup process, the "link" light on the card is active. The connections fails after around 15 seconds.

Iwconfig shows device: eth0 and channel:6 when I open it. I change eth0 to wlan0 and leave channel the same. After around 15 second, I get "connection failed."

Iwconfig in the shell tells me:
lo no wireless extensions
Warning: Driver for device wlan0 recommend version 18 of Wireless Extension, but has been compiled with version 16, therefore some driver features may not be available...

Following advice on this forum, I've added the following to /opt/bootlocal.sh:

modprobe ndiswrapper
/opt/myiwconfig.sh

Rebooted numerous times during this troubleshooting process to see whether it starts working.

It hasn't, but I'm confident that someone on here will know just the right thing to suggest.

Posted by hermes3000 on Aug. 04 2006,19:08

figured it out:

this driver, found in the winxp directory of the card's CD, works:

netcg54l.inf

what I was missing was the SID of the university network
once I put that and the driver into ndiswrapper, it worked