wireless fc8 dell latitude d400

[Paul Johnson]

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 3:39 PM, Dave Burns <tburns at hawaii.edu> wrote:
> Is there a canonical source to RTFM? Googling gets a million hits, no
> relevance so far.
>
> I am trying to connect to a WEP network. I left click on the
> NetworkManger icon upper right, select 'connect to other wireless
> network', it opens a dialog, I type in network name, select 128 bit
> wep and enter the key, hit connect. log contents after that:
> [root at iprctmp1 mail]#  tail /var/log/messages [...]
>

Hey, man, many of us have been there.

Can I ask some basics?

1. Can you connect to ANY wireless networks, ones without WEP or other
encryption?

2. You can try two approaches to get connections.  EITHER use
NetworkManager or you can try the manual approach.  But both don't
generally work at the same time.  NetworkManager will wreck your
manual effort, and your manual effort will frustrate NetworkManager.

To use NetworkManager, use system-config-services to turn ON
networkManager and turn OFF network and wpa supplicant.  In Fedora 8,
I'm getting pretty good results with that.  The alternative is to
turn OFF NetowrkManager, wpa supplicant, and leave network on.  I was
one of the people who kept trying to do everything, so NetworkManager
never worked. Then I learned that one is supposed to have
wpasupplicant and network services were off.  If you turn off
NetworkManager, then you take the more old fashioned approach, but it
does work if you study it carefully.  You use system-config-network to
try to manually put in the settings.  There is a point and click
"activate" button.  That writes scripts into
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts and you can turn connections on and off
with /sbin/ifup wlan0 and /sbin/ifdown wlan0.
If you don't want to use that approach, you can get even more basic,
and do the really old fashioned way, the commands like "iwconfig" and
such that you can google about.

If you turn off networkmanager, in system-config-network, you can go
into the wirelss thing and put in your wep key.  If it is hexadecimal,
and I think most of them will be, you put 0x at the front of the
string.  I once visited a place with a 128 bit key and it made me
laugh to type it out 0xabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.  That will get
written into /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts in a file called
wlan0-keys or such, and you can study how that is put together.
Sometimes, I have found it really does help to specify the channel on
which the router is broadcasting in the setup file.


3.  Run "/sbin/iwlist scan" to see a list of wireless access points.
Does the server you are looking for appear in the way that you expect?

I don't have the Broadcom card that you have. Mine are all Intel, and
I know the Broadcoms were slower to receive support.

HTH!

PJ

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas