Mandrake10 Official on Satellite A10

[Guest Orion]

I recently started using Mandrake (and linux) about 5 months ago and I love it. I ask myself why I didn't start sooner. Anyway, I've used it on my desktop PC and things have been coming along really well. My girlfriend saw how much I like linux and how well it works, so she asked me if she could try it on her Toshiba Satellite A10. No problem, I set it up to dual-boot cause she already had wincrap XP home on there, so I left it there so she can have familiar territory to go back to if need be.

So I installed Mandrake10 official and everything works great! She loves being able to simply plug her digital camera into one of the USB's and seing the little hard-drive icon apear on her desktop from which she can copy her pictures.

Now when I installed linux on her laptop, I did it with a regular LAN connection to our D-link hub which also works as a wireless router (D-LINK DI-714P+) and setup made the LAN connection no problem. The thing is that she doesn't want to be stuck having to plug into the hub with a LAN cable so I also wanted to get the wireless working as well. Getting this to work is what will really convince her on linux; she's already half way there with all the frustration she goes through using XP crapwind. Now I go to setup the wireless connection through control centre and it automatically chooses orinoco_cs for eth1 as intersil PRISM2 11 MBPS wireless adapter. OK. I basically let mandrake setup the connection, it sets it up as automatic IP(BOOTP/DHCP), then it goes for assigning host name from DHCP address. So for DHCP host name I can leave that blank right? Then I get to operating mode, and it has a few different options; Managed, Repeater, Auto, Ad-hoc...I've tried different ones and none seem to work. Network name is automatically populates "any" now I've tried it with "any" and also with "Cara" which is the ESSID network name. I then carefully(yes I typed it correctly) eter the Encryption Key(128-bit). It then asks me to enter parameters for RTS/CTS and Fragmentation. Ive tried it with leaving these blank and also with the numerical values for RTS and Fragmentation which I found in my D-LINK's wireless performance features. Then it gets to host name and I leave "localhost" in there. I leave zeroconf blank cause I'm not to sure what that does.(hey, I'm no TCP/IP expert, OK?) Everything I try doesn't work. I've googled for the answer, Ive tried "RTFM", I've tried and tried and tried!!! Has anybody succeded in setting up wireless on one of these laptops, any thoughts on how I can get it to work? Advice would be much appreciated!!!

:mdk: :D

[SoulSe]

Welcome to the board!

 

I have lots of good news and I have bad news...

 

The bad news is: I can not help you with this problem specifically.

 

The good news is: The wireless network card is working, which means that there is DEFINATELY a solution and, if you stick around, some of the other clever users on this board who know more than I do about wireless networks will be in here to help you soon!

 

SO: stick around! ;)

[Guest Orion]

I did manage to get the wireless card working for a while as eth1 using intersil PRISM2 11 MBPS wireless adapter(orinoco_cs). I think I had to drop the wireless encryption down to 64-bit...not too sure if the driver supports 128-bit. So it was working, until I rebooted. Once mandrake rebooted I was confronted with an unusual message of "eth1 has been removed-do you want to configure the module" (or something like that). I tried eveerything, I tried redoing it and setting eth0 to NOT start at boot, I even reformatted and deleted eth0 after setting up eth1 as the wireless. I tried setting up eth0 as wireless during installation, and that wouldn't even let me manually choose orinoco_cs. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm starting to think all my frustration stems from the fact that this is the free-download version of Mandrake10 Official. I mean it says during setup anyway that some ADSL modems and video cards aren't supported, so maybe that goes for wirelless adapters too. If this is true I am OK with having to buy Mandrake10, that's not a problem. But if this is not the case then I may just have to look into trying another distro. Any feedback is very-much appreciated!!!!!

[Guest phlyersphan]

This may not directly help you, but I just went through hours of trying to configure a wireless usb network card in mandrake 10. it ends up that all i had to do was go through the mandrake control center and configure it. my wlan0 device was pointing to something goofy like the pci bridge on my motherboard, but i tried the configuration anyway and voila, it worked.

 

i configured the ESSID, encryption key, channel number, and set it as a managed connection. (since you're using an essid and wep, it sounds like managed should be your setting - unless auto works). also had to configure the tcp/ip settings (ip address or dhcp, subnet mask, dns server, default gateway).

[javabiz]

Here's some things to try with M10-O!

You say you had it working and then it says it couldn't find the card? Boot it up and enter the terminal mode from KDE. Go to SU mode in the terminal.

type these commands!

# modprobe yenta_socket

# /etc/init.d/pcmcia restart

 

This assumes you have a wireless card in a pcmcia slot!

# lsmod

 

To see if yenta_socket is indeed running.

ping your gateway

if success, your in

The bad news is it will probably not find the card again when it reboots.

The good news is--there is a fix for auto detecting the card at boot! I'll post here when I find it.

Just keep entering the above commands until then!

Edited July 21, 2004 by javabiz