Re: Ethernet & Wifi Weirdness
Mark wrote:
I'm still mostly a newbie on Linux (intermediate Mac & Win user). I'm
having a strange problem on my Linux box, which is a Dell e1505 notebook.
I installed Lenny the other day. My home router's wifi is set up with
WPA personal and mac address filtering (and I didn't know to plan
ahead for this), so Lenny's installation routine did not set up the
wifi. However, regular wired ethernet worked. I then installed
VirtualBox (latest version) with a WinXP Pro guest (for my wife).
Wired Internet piped through VBox into WinXP just fine.
Then I started doing rookie things. I browsed the Internet looking for
ways to get the wifi working. I apt-get installed a few things; got
the program Wifi-Wiz, and configured it to use NDISwrapper without
really knowing what I was doing. Beyond this account, I can't really
recall what I did to the system. Here's what resulted from my efforts:
the Lenny installation continued to have working wired Internet. I
successfully got (using auto-DHCP) a good IP address from the wireless
router, though the address periodically switched between 192.168.1.24
and 192.168.1.39 for no reason that I could tell. My Gnome desktop was
not getting wireless Internet: that is, Iceweasel couldn't open any
URLs unless the ethernet cable was plugged in. However, when I started
up WinXP in VirtualBox, WinXP *did* get wireless Internet.
In trying to fix this (again, blindly) -- i.e. get wireless to work on
Gnome as well as on VirtualBox's WinXP machine -- I somehow wrecked
the network entirely. Now when I boot up no Internet of any kind
works, wired, wireless, Gnome, VBox-WinXP.
Is there a newbie-friendly manual somewhere that I can use to
configure the networking from scratch? Any thoughts about what might
be going wrong?
- Mark
The wiki (http://wiki.debian.org/WiFi) has the information you need.
NDISWrapper should only be used as a last resort. It uses Windows
drivers in Linux. It's better to use native Linux drivers, unless you
have a wi-fi card that doesn't have a Linux driver. What wireless
network card do you have?
After that, just install network-manager and network-manager-gnome, then
on your desktop, in the notification area, you'll have an icon that,
when you click on it, will list the wireless networks it finds, and will
let you connect to any of them. WPA is handled for you.
Hope this helps!
-- Kevin
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