Last resort - Problems with RT2500 and Ndiswrapper

Forum: Networking
Topic: Last resort - Problems with RT2500 and Ndiswrapper
started by: WhiteBunny

Posted by WhiteBunny on Aug. 07 2006,20:48

I hope someone here could please help me. I have installed damn small linux on an old dell latitude with 64meg ram and 6 gig hard disk. The install has gone fine and so far everything works, except the wireless card.

It is a ralink chipset, RT2500 in a PCMCIA card. I have used the ndiswrapper command and have got a wlan0. It shows up when running iwconfig. I have set the essid and wep key to the right values but it still does not connect to the router.

Here is what I have so far:

ndiswrapper -l
rt2500 driver installed, hardware present

iwconfig wlan0
Warning: Driver for device wlan0 recommended version 18 of Wireless Extension, but has been compiled with version 16, therefore some driver features may not be available...

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"X-Station"
Mode:Auto Frequency:2.437GHz Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Bit Rate:54Mb/s Tx-Power:20 dBm Sensitivity=-121 dBm
RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
Encryption key:C677-4663-DD Security mode:restricted
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

iwlist wlan0 scanning
Warning: Driver for device wlan0 recommended version 18 of Wireless Extension, but has been compiled with version 16, therefore some driver features may not be available...

wlan0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - AddressL 00:11:22:36:67:00
ESSID: "X-Station"
Protocol: IEEE 802.11g
Mode: Managed
Frequency: 2.437GHz
etc...

When performing the scan the link light on the card flashes away like it should and seems to work ok. However I cannot connect to the router. I've tried ifconfig wlan0 down and then ifconfig wlan0 up with no effect.

I've tried appending nodhcp to the lilo.conf file and still no luck. Its as if everything is working but it just won't connect and get an ip address.

One site I looked on suggested dhclient wlan0 but DSL doesn't seem to have the dhclient command.

I've no idea what to do next. Can anyone suggest something which might solve the problem?

Thanks in advance,
Dave

Posted by roberts on Aug. 07 2006,22:18

Our dhclient is pump. Does pump -i wlan0 help?

Posted by WhiteBunny on Aug. 08 2006,00:13

Yes thats managed to make it work. Thought I was going to go mad. Thanks for your help.

I just managed to get the sound working too using sndconfig! This linux distro has made an old laptop really useful. And it runs faster than my win XP machine

Once again, thanks