phunni Posted July 21, 2006 Report Share Posted July 21, 2006 I'm trying to rebuild my desktop from scratch so I began with a brand new installation of arch linux. I got through the base install and went to set up the wireless networking... I searched around and discovered that my wireless card (Belkin F5D7001uk) did have native drivers but they are still beta. I tried them anyway and couldn't even get them to compile... So I went with ndiswrapper. I followed the instructions on the arch wiki and the ndiswrapper website they pointed to... I am confident that the basic setup is correct for the following reasons: 1)There are lights on the network card... 2) when I do a "iwlist wlan0 scan" I am told about my wireless network - including the mac address of my router - which it could only get through wireless means. I then set up my network to get it's config via dhcp - my rc.conf contains the following: wlan_wlan0="wlan0 essid RedFruit" wlan="dhcp" I went to restart the network and it failed... I then tried to setup my card with a static ip which worked - but still I had no connectivity to my network... I know that the wireless and the dhcp work perfectly well because I'm using them right now via my windows laptop... I'm at a complete loss with this. As far as I can make out it should be working fine - but it isn't! Please give me some pointers someone! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted July 21, 2006 Report Share Posted July 21, 2006 I then tried to setup my card with a static ip which worked - but still I had no connectivity to my network... Did you make sure to set your gateway and also populate resolv.conf? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted July 21, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 21, 2006 I assumed both of those would be covered by dhcp... Is that not correct? Edit: sorry I read your post again and you meant when I set things up with static settings. I did set the gateway but I didn't bother with resolv.conf since I figured that I'd be able to ping the router by ip if I had network connectivity and I could sort the nameservers out after that... But I couldn't ping anything... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted July 22, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 22, 2006 any ideas? I haveno other network conenctivity on this box except wireless so if I can't get it figured out then I'll have to put windows back on it - but I was really looking forward to my nice, clean arch install... Edit: when I try to set up a static config; for a network ip address address range of 192.168.1.x should I broadcast 192.168.1.255? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted July 22, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 22, 2006 I wonder now whether the driver is set up properly. For example, I checked through all the .conf files in /etc/ndiswrapper and all of them have a field called mac_address with a value of XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX which, obviously, isn't right... I've also jsut noticed that when I switch my PC off then my router lists my card (by mac address) as being an attached device. As soon as the system tries to start the network then it's no longer listed... Please, please - does anyone have any clues as to what I might want to try...? I'm becoming more and more convinced that this is possible, but I just need tp change the right setting... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted July 22, 2006 Report Share Posted July 22, 2006 I had arch installed on my laptop until a while ago. Wireless with ndiswrapper was working fine, then I updated ndiswrapper, and it was complaining saying the module doesn't exist so I could never get it working again even when removing and reinstalling. Did you install ndiswrapper from source, or using pacman? Have you used the ndiswrapper wiki install guide as a base to go from? I'm not sure what else to suggest, as I followed these and they worked fine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted July 22, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 22, 2006 I installed via pacman and followed the wiki closely... I really do wonder if one of the conf files in /etc/ndiswrapper needs some tweaking - but I wouldn't know where to start... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted July 22, 2006 Report Share Posted July 22, 2006 Hehehe... I am not the only one with Arch problems. :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted July 23, 2006 Report Share Posted July 23, 2006 (edited) Are you using an oldfashioned kernel ( kernel modules being loaded via initrd) or a current one? (using initrdcpio for loading modules). Edited July 23, 2006 by scarecrow Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted July 23, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 23, 2006 I believe I'm using the latest approach. I literally made a fresh install with an 0.7.2 iso I've done very little with the install at present as I don't have any network connectivity (due to this problem...) and I've not even done any kind of initial pacman sync... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted July 23, 2006 Report Share Posted July 23, 2006 (edited) You may have to touch by hand /boot/mkinitcpio-kernel26.conf and include there the needed modules manually. Alternatively, use either the full image ( kernel26-fallback.img ) or the old initramfs image, which will soon be obsolete. The new initcpio system looks troublesome, but is a big step forward- just use it. Oh, by the way I have trouble using it in my main box with the (unofficial) beyond kernel, because only the first of my two SATA hd's is initialized, and I get a kernel panic on boot. However, either the old kernel image (initramfs), or initcpio and the stock kernel work fine. Likely it's a bug on some patch used by the -beyond patchset, there's already a thread about that on Arch forums. Likely to be resolved soon. Edited July 23, 2006 by scarecrow Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted July 23, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 23, 2006 Is it simply a case of listing modules in that config file? I think that perhaps I am using an older kernel after all, since I notice that it's the next one from the one I'm using (2.16.6) which relies on mkinitcpio... perhaps I should upgrade my kernel... I can't get ndiswrapper running in the new kernel - I'll leave the kernel upgrade till I've got network and I can do it properly... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted July 23, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 23, 2006 I'm about ready to give up on this now... I did a man iwconfig and read that the link quality (which I checked and is 0/100) is dependant on the driver and the hardware... I don't know what I can do to get this working any better... I'm gutted - especially as this means I'm probably going to have to use windows exclusively... :sad: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted July 24, 2006 Report Share Posted July 24, 2006 Here's the ndiswrapper wiki entry I wrote after I had problems in arch: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ndiswr..._wpa_supplicant Hope it helps, I just remembered about it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted July 24, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 24, 2006 wpa_supplicant is for encrypted stuff right? I'm not using any encryption on my wireless since it caused my laptop to keep dropping the connection and I figured that everything goes out to the internet in plain text anyway... Except for SSL which is encrypted from the browser... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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