mystified

Thanks, I like the last one!

Very nice. Thank you.

I really need to finally some totally awesome wallpaper and icon theme for the lappy. But I get bored with kde-look.org. I need a light wallpaper because I use a karamba theme that can't be read with dark wallpaper. Anybody know of some good places to look? I like bizarre wallpaper. Not boring!

No, I've got the lappy plugged in with a cable. I did deactive eth0 and disconnect the cable and try and no such luck.

I did copy everything into /lib/hotplug/firmware. I do have my desktop plugged directly into my router.

ebian:/home/mystified# ifconfig -a
eth0	  Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:16:36:15:F1:0E
	  inet addr:192.168.1.2  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
	  inet6 addr: fe80::216:36ff:fe15:f10e/64 Scope:Link
	  UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
	  RX packets:2758 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
	  TX packets:2733 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
	  collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
	  RX bytes:2442734 (2.3 MiB)  TX bytes:717825 (701.0 KiB)
	  Interrupt:169 Base address:0x1800

eth1	  Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:16:CE:13:E2:08
	  UP 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:217 Memory:e2000000-e2002000

lo		Link encap:Local Loopback
	  inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
	  inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
	  UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
	  RX packets:58 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
	  TX packets:58 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
	  collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
	  RX bytes:4020 (3.9 KiB)  TX bytes:4020 (3.9 KiB)

It looks like there's a hardware address there.

My windows driver is bcmlw5.inf. The native driver is bcm43xx. I need to get rid of the native driver which blacklisting it and doing rmmod should have taken care of.

debian:/home/mystified# ndiswrapper -e bcm43xx
couldn't delete /etc/ndiswrapper/bcm43xx

The only thing under /etc/ndiswrapper is my windows driver.

ndiswrapper is all done by command line in Debian. As are a lot of things. Thanks for the suggestion!

I had wireless working in Debian and then suddenly it stopped. I even tried reinstalling to no luck. I tried the native linux driver following the Debian Etch installation guide but couldn't not get wireless working. After googling for days (literally) I have discovered the following. The native drivers will sometimes not work because there is a conflict with udev. Switching to ndiswrapper didn't help either. I blacklisted my bcm43xx drivers and even did rmmod bcm43xx but when I do ndiswrapper -l it shows my windows driver plus the native bcm43xx driver as an alternative. Everything I've read says that if they both show up there's a conflict and it won't work. Even after blacklisting the driver and doing rmmod still no luck, the native driver still shows up. I really like debian a lot and am thinking about installing it on my desktop but I need wireless to work on my lappy. I posted on the Debian forum but so far nothing has worked. I have found out through my googling that Mepis seems to have a lot of luck with this card but after reading the earlier post I don't know if I want to go that route.

Any suggestions guys? I'm braindead at this point!

I tried the native driver and it didn't work. I have the card working now and I just don't want to cause problems with it. I'll probably mess with encryption again but I want to do some more research.

I called Acer and they said it was not a hardware problem. They had me change an option in Windows and now it starts at boot.

So far restarting the network is working. Now I have to try encryption.

I did find this site http://ara.edos-project.org which let's you search for available packages in Debian by name. So far I have to say I'm pretty impressed with Debian.

EDIT: I could not get WEP encryption to work and WEP is the only option offered. I don't know why it didn't work. It's pretty straight forward and easy to use.

I also found this command while researching Debian: apt-cache search package name. Now I know how to find the exact name of the packages I need. I'm having fun googling and learning more! :)

One of the things I'm enjoying is that Debian left KDE alone and like Gentoo it's the way it was designed. I hate what Mandriva did to KDE. I have no idea why they messed with it and even took out a working feature. The menu updating tool.

Thanks for the answers Greg and arctic. I'm sure I'll have more! :)

As far as my wireless card goes I went to Acer and filled out an online technical support form. It says it takes 3 to 4 business days to get a response so hopefully I'll hear from them by the end of the week.

Now as far as my Broadcom card goes I've done a lot of research on it in the past year because it has given me so many problems and everything I've read says this card is a problem in linux. I found one thread where someone posted about how to set the card up using ndiswrapper and he included a poll and over 60% of the people said they couldn't get it to work. According to Mandriva errata the linux drivers are reverse engineered and not provided by Broadcom so they are considered to be unstable. On the Debian page I found it told me not to use those drivers but to use ndiswrapper instead. The difference so far between Mandriva and Debian is that when wireless quit working in Mandriva nothing I tried would get it working again. In Debian, the two times it has stopped working restarting the network did the trick. But people have also told me that ndiswrapper using windows drivers are also unstable. As far as windows goes, I have rarely booted into it since last semester when I needed a windows program for school. But since day one sometimes the network started at boot and sometimes it didn't. But all it took was a few clicks to get it up and working. I've had a number of people tell me that wireless in Windows is flaky so I just chalked it up to that. So now I'll just have to wait and see what the Acer people say.

I just installed Debian Etch and with some help from Greg2 I have almost everything I need setup. But I do have some questions:

Is there a way to search for package without knowing the full package name?

How do I start daemons?

Also, I configured wireless networking using the native linux drivers and ran into the same problem I did with Mandriva. So I googled and found some info and it said do not use the native linux drivers. Use ndiswrapper. I followed the instructions step by step and it worked. But then I rebooted and no internet. So I ran as root: /etc/init.d/networking restart. And it started my wireless. I don't know why it's not starting at boot but is there some file I can edit that will tell it to start at boot? I have a smilar problem in Windows. Sometimes when I boot wireless starts and sometimes it doesn't and I have to use the repair option and it always works and I get wireless. I've heard people say that wireless in Windows is unpredictable. I guess my main concern is that it's not a hardware problem because I only have two weeks left on my warranty.

Well I solved my wireless problem. I switched to Debian Etch. I was really easy to set up wireless. :)

Well it hit portage today so I have it installed. I'll have to read the changelog to see what's new.

Just a thought but have you checked /etc/modprobe.conf for the line

 alias wlan0 ndiswrapper

this will tell wlan0 which driver to use.

If there isn't one then add it.

Yes I added it after I removed the one for the native driver. I'm going to try and find the time to reinstall this afternoon. I hope that goes well. I had problems with my last installation.

I think I'm going to try reinstalling. This is the problem when using gui tools. You don't really know what files are changed.

I'm using it since several days (it's exactly the same as RC4), compiled from source. Running great.

How long did it take to compile? In Gentoo they have a binary and that's what I use so I've never compiled it from source.

Well I did all that and still no luck. It scans for my network and can't find it. I don't know if this means anything or not but when I go to hardware and click on my wireless card it shows modules bcm43xx.

Sorry the native module is not working out for you. Using your favorite editor open /etc/modprobe.conf and add the line:

blacklist bcm43xx

this will prevent the bcm43xx module from loading.

This didn't work. It's still using bcm43xx. Also I copies the windows driver and I put the .sys and .inf. I checked ndiswrapper and it shows that my driver.inf is installed and hardware found but .sys is an invalid driver. So it gives me a message at the end showing invalid driver. There is no other .sys for this card in windows.

Sorry for being a pain. :P

I think WalMart sold computers with Lindows preinstalled. Not a very good choice.

Yes it's broadcasting and it shows the name of the SSID. I tried to reconfigure it using ndiswrapper and the windows drive but when I check hardware it shows it's still using the native driver.

I'm not sure what you mean tyme. How do I accomplish that?

Ok I rebooted my router, deleted my wireless network connection and set it up without any encryption (Yes I changed it in my router :P ). The problem is that when it scans for networks it's not finding mine.

Edit: I did some googling and according to a mandriva wiki this driver is considered unstable. :(

Yes I have windows and in xp it's flaky too but easy to fix. But I had a similar issue in Mandriva 2005LE on another computer. Everytime I rebooted I lost wireless and had to set it up again. This also happened in 2006 but like in 2007 once it stopped I couldn't get it working again unless I reinstalled.

I'll try removing wep :P What do you suggestion WPA?

Yes I use WEP but I don't have any other wireless computers.