ipw2200 on thinkpad r50e wont connect wireless ubuntu 6.06

MagnumIP · Post by **MagnumIP** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 12:42 am

For the life of me, I can't figure out how to get this thing to connect to my router wirelessly. Not sure what settings I am suppose to set so any help would be appriciated. Thanks

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 4:51 am

Have you tried installing NetworkManager? I have an R52, and all that I needed to do was install the "network-manager-gnome" package, and I was good to go. That being said, WPA is still very flakey for me, no matter what distro I run. Wireless under Windows seems to be a bit more reliable from my experience.

You might want to give these pages a quick reading:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installin ... nkPad_R50e
http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/Network_Manager_with_WPA

MagnumIP · Post by **MagnumIP** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 7:15 am

I did that already. I thnik my problem lies in updating my system after I install it. I will try just to install network manager to see if that was it. If not, i'm going to try my luck using slackware instead

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 7:28 am

Are you using WEP or WPA or anything? That first post is pretty vague. The ipw2200 drivers should be seamless, more or less - IIRC they can't do some things still, but for surfing you should be good OOTB. The one thing about netowrk manager is that you'll want to comment out all of your interfaces except lo in /etc/network/interfaces or you won't be able to controll anything with it at all.

Karl · Post by **Karl** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 7:33 am

Do you have broadcast ssid disabled on the wireless access point? I've noticed that Network Manager doesn't like hidden SSIDs.

MagnumIP · Post by **MagnumIP** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 8:41 am

I am using wep cause of my Tivo on my network. I tried to use some settings that I found on the Ubuntu forums and i borked my install of Dapper. I am going to try Kubuntu again. At least with Kubuntu wired connections work without any work to it. I tried updating my firmware and drivers but that didnt help at all. I noticed with Kubuntu, I was able to connect to my network wirelessly without wep on but with wep on, I could see it but not connect. I have tried to manually edit the /etc/network/interfaces but that didnt work either. Should I not do "apt-get update" then install all the updates after aI install the OS?

MagnumIP · Post by **MagnumIP** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 9:02 am

So after my install of Kubuntu, all I did was install knetworkmanager. Wired connection works fine. Wireless can see the network but not connect. I commented everything out of the /etc/network/interfaces except "lo". Still no go. Maybe my lappy was never meant to have wireless working.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 9:13 am

That router wouldn't happen to be an airport, would it? Apple's password hash for WEP keys is fux0red.

MagnumIP · Post by **MagnumIP** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 9:18 am

No. The router is a crappy WRT54G v5. I tried the iwconfig and puit my wep key in there and still no go.

Karl · Post by **Karl** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 10:20 am

Have you tried using the hex key and not the passphrase for WEP? I've had that problem with linksys routers and linux.

MagnumIP · Post by **MagnumIP** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 10:46 am

Yep. Used the hex key (tried all 4 of them) and it still didn't work. Not sure what else to do.

MagnumIP · Post by **MagnumIP** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 11:22 am

Ok. I did another complete install of Kubuntu. This time, I had it connected wired when I was installing. After the install and doing the update, I rebooted the laptop. After it rebooted, I went into system settings > network settings. I changed the default route to eth1 instead of eth0. I then changed the default transmit key on my router to 1 instead of 2. I started up Wireless Assistant and clicked on my network. I entered my key and BAM!!! I was connected. I think the default transmit key was the culprit on my router. Still weird that Ubuntu didn't even see both my wired or wireless card but Kubuntu does. You would think they are the same except for the GUI. Let's see how long my wireless connection lasts after this. I am going to test this out at my girlfriends apt tonight. She uses WEP too cause of Tivo. Thanks for all the help guys. I might need it again if this doesnt keep.

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 3:23 am

Sounds good. While we're on the topic of wireless, I've been having some issues on my ThinkPad under Slack 11. I have wireless working with WPA just fine, but I'm having trouble getting it to start automatically at boot. The problem is that if I have my ethernet cable plugged in, my wireless device is eth1, but if I don't have ethernet plugged in, it's eth0, which screws up my configuration file, since it ends up looking for the wrong device. Also, when I boot it up without an ethernet cable, it hangs on "dhcpcd: MAC address =" for about 40 seconds, since it can't establish a connection with my router.

Is there a way to have dhcpcd automatically skip that device if there is no cable present?

Chess, are you out there?

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 7:08 am

man iftab

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 7:12 am

That won't fix everything, but it will allow you to map macs to network devices. I looked for a solution for arch forever, and this is the only/best solution I came up with that didn't include hacking udev rules together.