Thinkpads Forum

has anyone had trouble with ubuntu recognising their wireless card?

i know i have the right driver, and that my TP sees the card but there is no power going to it because the power light on the card is not on.

please help

kieran wrote:has anyone had trouble with ubuntu recognising their wireless card?

i know i have the right driver, and that my TP sees the card but there is no power going to it because the power light on the card is not on.

please help

What does the command "iwconfig" give you?

i see the card on eth1 but im not able to use that connection, i was told to go into the power management settings but i don't know how to do that from iwconfig, becasue i am just a new Linux user.

what should i be looking for?

1) Open a terminal - applications -> accessories -> terminal
2) type "iwconfig"
3) type ifconfig
4) type sudo ifdown eth1
5) type sudo ifup eth1
6) Do you know what type of card it is and what drivers are being used?
If not, type lspci -v and lspci -n

Post the output for us to see.

-Ben

this is what those commands resulted

kieran@lapdance:~$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

eth1 IEEE 802.11b/g ESSID:off/any Nickname:"Broadcom 4306"
Mode:Managed Access Point: Invalid
RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

irda0 no wireless extensions.

sit0 no wireless extensions.

kieran@lapdance:~$ ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:03:47:B9:C4:AF
inet addr:192.168.0.104 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::203:47ff:feb9:c4af/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1029 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:116 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:374978 (366.1 KiB) TX bytes:12802 (12.5 KiB)

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:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:100 (100.0 b) TX bytes:100 (100.0 b)

kieran@lapdance:~$ sudo ifdown eth1
Password:
ifdown: interface eth1 not configured
kieran@lapdance:~$ sudo ifup eth 1
Ignoring unknown interface eth=eth.
Ignoring unknown interface 1=1.

i forgot the type of card and driver

BCM 4306 card

bcmwl5.inf

This card has a binary driver,right? I know that a new linux driver came out but I think that it was for FC5 - I might be wrong about the drivers but the errors in the output from ifconfig eth1 suggest that it might be the case.

Maybe you need to install ndiswrapper? If so, you could start your search here or here

If the hardware installation is OK, you might need to modprobe the card


#sudo ifconfig -a

(don't necessarily need to do this, it tells you the name of the interface which we know is eth1 or wlan0 if you are using ndiswrapper)

#sudo modprobe eth_pci

or more likely

#sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

(not sure if this is the hardware name, you need to run dmesg and check the hardware to see what linux calls the card)

#ifconfig eth1 up

(same as #ifup eth1 )

#iwlist eth scan

(gives you a list of available access points)

#iwconfig eth1 mode managed essid XXXXX

( XXXXX is the access point name )

#dhclient

(gets you an IP address over DHCP)

smugiri wrote:This card has a binary driver,right? I know that a new linux driver came out but I think that it was for FC5 - I might be wrong about the drivers but the errors in the output from ifconfig eth1 suggest that it might be the case.

I would have to disagree, at least at this point. To me the ifconfig output says the kernel is seeing the hardware just fine. If a driver was not loaded, that would not be the case. From a prompt, could you try these commands please?

sudo lsmod | grep bcm43
sudo lsmod | grep ndis
cat /etc/network/interfaces
ps -ef | grep -i net

im very new to ubuntu so im sorry but im not sure how to put these commands into the terminal, i type them in but it says that "command not found"

kieran wrote:im very new to ubuntu so im sorry but im not sure how to put these commands into the terminal, i type them in but it says that "command not found"

Which version of Ubuntu are you using?

Try:

Update: New kernel, the wireless card was not found any more... After some investigating, it turned out that there was no kernel modules for the new kernel present in the driver package. I solved it by downloading the Generic Debian source packages (driverloader_2.34_i386.deb.zip) that builds suitable modules when installed (sudo dpkg -i). Wireless again!

We can help you better if you mind joining http://www.ubuntuforums.org/

Anyways your all answers are here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php? ... ode=linear

Cheers!

i am using the newest version of ubuntu 6.10

kieran wrote:im very new to ubuntu so im sorry but im not sure how to put these commands into the terminal, i type them in but it says that "command not found"

Hmm. That really doesn't make sense.
You seemed to have no problem doing commands earlier, so that doesn't seem like it. You could try

sudo lsmod (don't provide the output, just if it works)

If that doesn't give a list of modules, like:
$ sudo lsmod
Module Size Used by
ipaq 33240 0
usbserial 33448 1 ipaq
usblp 14336 0

then try

whereis lsmod

which should give you something like:
$ whereis lsmod
lsmod: /bin/lsmod.modutils /bin/lsmod /sbin/lsmod.modutils /sbin/lsmod.Lmodutils /sbin/lsmod /usr/share/man/man8/lsmod.8.gz

If whereis lsmod didn't give you a location, then you can do this:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install module-init-tools

finally, you never gave us the output of
cat /etc/network/interfaces

-Ben

ryengineer wrote: We can help you better if you mind joining http://www.ubuntuforums.org/

I'm happy to keep plugging away here, but you will possibly get faster or better help at ubuntuforums.org - your choice.

Unless this isn't enough thinkpad related to be allowed here?

-Ben