jubilee33

I just tried the other driver and I met with the same problem. I got "hardware present, driver installed" and everything but when I actually tried to bring up wlan0, there was "no such device" again. The funny thing is that I saw wlan0 was brought up in startup (verbose mode). How was that possible?

I tried using the native driver but installing it was such a lengthy process and I failed more miserably than with ndiswrapper. What should I do next? Am I completely hopeless with this card?

My chipset is Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini, which is strangely recognized as 2100 3A in Windows.

I did an lsmod and I saw ndiswrapper in the list but I wasn't sure whether it was actually loaded because it was used by 0 (what does it mean??). So I did "modprobe ndiswrapper" anyway. But I wasn't able to bring wlan0 up. I got the same result like yesterday, "no such device".

I used a driver that was made by IBM with the same pci id (8086:1043) and the chipset was Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 3B mini. I just saw a driver for Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 3A mini but the pci id didn't match at all. Do you think I should try this one out?

Or do you have another suggestion for me to continue troubleshooting (since the driver was already properly installed and recognized)?

I think I accidentally removed some button on the bottom panel. Now whenever I minimize some windows, they all disappear instead of minimizing into the bottom panel. It is really rather inconvenient when I don't know where to find my windows back. What can I do to change this setting back to normal (default)?

I already added the line in modprobe.conf. And below is the result when I tried "ifup wlan0".

ifup wlan0

 

SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such device

 

Determining IP information for wlan0...SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such device

SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such device

When I installed ndiswrapper I was in super user mode. I can only use "ndiswrapper -l" to check the status of the driver under superuser mode. The result was "hardware present, driver installed." Does this matter?

Which steps of the installation instruction (Ndiswrapper Installation) have to be done under superuser?

Yes, this is the driver that I used and failed. I am afraid that the mini pci card is a little obscure as I had a hard time finding a Windows driver too. Any other idea?

Did you use this driver?

http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R115321.EXE

Use wine R115321.EXE to extract it and then

use ~/.wine/drive_c/dell/drivers/R115321/DRIVER/bcmwl5.inf?

There is only one driver with that pci id, R115321.EXE. I don't suppose I can use other drivers that are for other models of Broadcom cards, right?

Check here:

 

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

 

there's quite a few cards with that pci-id. Just go through them and try the one that might work for you. I tend to use WinXP drivers over any others and they work with mine no probs.

Yes, I have tried both cli and mcc. I have encountered the same problem. I will try what Ian suggested and see what happens. At this point I do need someone to troubleshoot with me step by step as I don't know what else to do or where else to look. Thank you.

I just bought a new notebook three days ago and the internal wireless network card is Broadcom BCM94311 mini pci adapter (108g), which is recognized as BCM 4310 UART (rev 01) in Linux. The pciid is 14e4: 4312. So I went to ndiswrapper.sf.net and found a driver made by DELL in the list. However, it failed to install. After I used "ndiswrapper -l" to check the status, I got "invalid driver". Where can I find another driver for this network card? Or I should try another approach to get the card to work? Thank you for any help or suggestion you can give.

Sorry for getting back to you so late again. My another notebook just died on me completely and I bought a new one and the installation and everything took a couple of days.

Anyway, here is the result of "ifconfig -a" for wlan0 only.

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:04:23:8F:5B:42

BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1

RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000

RX bytes:0 (0.0 b ) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b )

Interrupt:5 Memory:fafef000-faff0000

I hope this will shed some light on this problem. I also have encountered the wireless connection problem in the new notebook that I just set up. I will post the question in "networking" since it is more appropriate, I suppose. Thank you very much.

Thank you Ian! Sorry for getting back late. I actually reinstalled Mandriva 2006 and did everything all over again very carefully. I encountered the same problem. This time it was a little different, though. When I used ifconfig, I cannot see wlan0. But when I booted Linux, wlan0 was brought up okay (verbose) and iwlist showed the correct ESSID, and other settings. How can I get to see wlan0 in ifconfig? (When I used ifconfig -a, I did see wlan0.) What's the different between ifconfig and ifconfig -a?

First, find out if the interface has an ip assigned:

 

ifconfig

 

network unreachable if you have an ip assigned, is normally due to problems with wep/wpa and the encryption not working correctly. I normally start with unsecured connections, and then add wep/wpa later. Makes it easier for making sure that wireless is working, before you complicate things by adding additional security.

I tried ifconfig and the result wasn't good. There was no assigned ip. I got 127.0.0.0 so I tried to assign an ip address but it stayed only for a second then it disappeared. Should I use MCC to create a wireless connection at all? In the wizard, I noticed there were two options available in terms of the driver for the network card. One was recognized as wlan0 (ipw2100) and the other was "use the driver with ndiswrapper". I tried both. Using ndiswrapper would not proceed to the end anyway because I got an error telling me that ndiswrapper wasn't functioning right (if this is indeed important, I will try it again and post the exact error message). So I ended up using iwconfig and the recognized wlan0 driver in the wizard. I can almost feel that there must be something amiss in what I did.

How can I assign an ip address correctly? I also tried using static ip in the wizard but it didn't help.

Also, when using ndiswrapper, WEP 128bit won't work for certain cards whereas WEP 64bit seems to work well for most. Finally, I think that card has a native linux driver available; if so you wouldn't need to use ndiswrapper. Something to investigate if you can't get it going. I suspect disabling WEP will get it working and WEP 64bit will probably work as well.

If I can find a native linux driver for the card, do I have to uninstall the current one used with ndiswrapper first? I will try disabling the WEP key if necessary. Also, should I disable the other Broadcom network card (wired and not used at this moment)? If so, how can I make sure that it won't come back? I already stopped it from loading at startup and deleted it in MCC but it reappeared in 2 minutes.

Thank you all!

First of all, thank you all for the very helpful instructions, tips and tricks. I used Mandrake Linux 9.0-9.2 a few years before and then stopped using it after I changed a notebook. Now I am using a Dell Inspiron 600m with Windows XP and Mandriva 2006 dual boot. I am still a newbie and have been really confused about the wireless connection problem.

My network card is Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 3a pci adapter and is working perfectly fine in Windows so there is no hardware failure. I read through ndiswrapper installation notes and many other sites and had no problem getting the driver to work. The network card is strangely recognized as 2100 3b but the driver is properly installed and the card recognized by Linux. And I had no problem using iwlist and iwconfig for all the configurations. Everything seems to be fine. I also used all of beesea's instructions on how to get wireless working with ndiswrapper (https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=14972) and wlan0 is recognized, brought up at boot, AP found, essid and open WEP key properly set up. But there is no connection. Whenever I try to connect, nothing happens. I tried to ping the router and I got "network is unreachable". That's the only error I can see now after two days of struggle. I am already completely at a loss as to where to begin the investigation. If anyone can give me a little hint or help, maybe I am missing something really important here, I would really appreciate your help.

Thank you!