Solved - Wireless won't start at boot

[littlemac]

Hi Folks,
I am using Antix 6.5 Final on a Dell C600 laptop. I connenct to the internet via NIC card which works well via ndiswrapper. My only problem (frustration) is that I have to enter the interface section of mnetwork and use the "Start/restart on Apply" function to connect to the internet. Wlan0 is set to "Start at boot" but it does not. No other interfaces are used on this machine and
they, of course, are not set to "Start at boot." This is not so much a problem as it is a frustration since I log on / off frequently during the course of my day. I would really appreciate it if someone could tell me how to get this connection to start at boot up. Thanks.

[Jerry3904]

This problem may be due to interference between a native driver and the Windows driver you are using with Ndiswrapper. The Dell D600 apparently has a bcm4309 chipset, making such a conflict more than likely: knetworkmanager might be trying to set up on another interface such as eth0.
Can you give us the output of entering the following into a terminal as root:

iwconfig
lspci | grep -i network (or: lsusb | grep -i network, for a usb adapter)
ndiswrapper -l

If there is indeed interference, you will need to suppress the native driver if you want to continue using ndiswrapper. See this page.

[littlemac]

Thanks jerry3904,
Here's the info:

iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"*******" Nickname:"default"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: 00:0F:B5:63:1C:64
Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Sensitivity=-200 dBm
RTS thr=2346 B Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption key:1418-4632-DF48-96AA-2F74-D039-99 Security mode:open
Power Management:off
Link Quality:56/100 Signal level:-60 dBm Noise level:-96 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0


ndiswrapper -l
mrv8000c : driver installed
device (11AB:1FAA) present

lspci | grep -i network returns no information, however . . .

lspci
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (rev 03)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge (rev 03)
0000:00:03.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1420
0000:00:03.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1420
0000:00:07.0 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02)
0000:00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
0000:00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
0000:00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 03)
0000:00:08.0 Multimedia audio controller: ESS Technology ES1983S Maestro-3i PCI Audio Accelerator (rev 10)
0000:00:10.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c556 Hurricane CardBus [Cyclone] (rev 10)
0000:00:10.1 Communication controller: 3Com Corporation Mini PCI 56k Winmodem (rev 10)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility M3 AGP 2x (rev 02)
0000:06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03)

[Jerry3904]

Not the bcm4309, huh? OK, my bad.

There is a native driver for the 88w8335 Libertas chipset in the kernel, according to the ndiswrapper wiki. Let's try getting that out of the way:

rmmod mrv8k

Let me know what happens.

[littlemac]

No luck, Jerry3904.

[handydan918]

but my experience with ndiswrapper was that I had to delete all other ndiswrapper drivers except for the one I wanted to use. Actually, I probably only had to delete one or two of them, but who knows which ones?

[littlemac]

Thanks, handydan918, for the input. I deleted all other drivers in ndiswrapper before installing the one for my card. I was running Mepis 6.0 on this laptop a while back and did not have the problem. It only started after installing 6.5. Mepis 6.5 worked well but a bit slow on this machine which is why I moved to Antix. I like it quite a bit but would really like to solve this issue. Please post any other thoughts you might have on it. That goes for everybody! Thanks again.

[carlops]

I recently discovered wicd (stevenp pointed it out at the mepis.org forum), it is a great front end for detection of wifi lans and automatically connecting. So far it works great for me, without the Knetworkmanager quirks.

You can add this line to the repos:
deb http://wicd.longren.org dapper all

Homepage is wicd.sourceforge.net

Just install via synaptic. Set the MEPIS assistant to manual and ESSID to any. Then reboot. Start the GUI by issuing /opt/wicd/gui.py in a console or create a menu entry for it.

It requires python, so if Antix does not have that, it needs to be installed as well.

[littlemac]

Hi Carlops and thanks for responding. I installed wicd via synaptic and gave it a shot but ran into problems. First, I still had to manually start the network even though I had the automatic connect option enabled. Second, the internet slowed to a crawl using wicd. Third, when running a speed test (timed out) the wrong ip address was displayed. Fourth, connection was spuratic (on / dropped / on / dropped and so on). I tried the .deb package from sourceforge and got the same result. Any ideas on any of this? By the way, Python is installed in Antix. Thanks.

[littlemac]

I might add that I am using the default fluxbox WM -- not sure if that would matter or not. Thanks again.