Re: Ethernet & Wifi Weirdness
On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 05:56:25PM -0500, 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?
>
Run 'lspci' and let us know what wireless card you have. If you've got
a laptop, I bet it's a broadcom something-or-other and you need
b43-fwcutter from the contrib or non-free repo (can't remember which).
-Rob
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