Linux help: MEPIS 3.3.1 and linksys wireless WPC54G
 

Anyone have any experience with MEPIS 3.3.1 and linksys wireless network routers? The machine in question currently has 2.6 on it and I cant even get it to find the wireless card, Linksys WPC54G. 3.3 is supposed to just work with this Linksys card. Sounded like a good reason to upgrade so Im downloading the 3.3 iso right now so I can reinstall it. Can anyone confirm that MEPIS 3.3 will work with this linksys card?

TIA

Sherman,

I'm sorry to say, but I know nothing of Mepis and very little of Linux at all.

With that said, you may still find some answers here.

Merry Christmas!

Randy

Thanks. I just got 3.3 loaded and it still doesnt see the card. Anybody know anything about ndiswrapper? MEPIS.org is telling me to load that, but Im so ignorant with this right now I dont even know where to put the driver :o

okay, heres what Ive learned so far.

Most of you guys already know this stuff, but Ive never used LINUX for anything but to goof off on the internet so I feel smarter for getting this far this morning.

iwconfig

the above command is the equivalant of windows ipconfig. When I ran this, the console confirmed that no wireless configuration was present.

Wireless companies dont like to open their source code to the LINUX world. ndiswrapper is a program that 'wraps' the proprietary windows wireless drivers so that they can be installed on LINUX. I thought I was going to have to install ndiswrapper, but a little searching told me there is a GUI that can be installed to search for packages that have already been installed with the distribution. The GUI is called synaptic.

this is my favorite part:

apt-get update
apt-get -install synaptic

That's a nice feature :cool:

And Im into synaptic searching for ndiswrapper. Turns out ndiswrapper is already delivered. Synaptic may have been there also, but like I said, Ive never messed with this stuff before.

Then I downloaded the windows driver for ths version of the wireless card and copied the unzipped 'Driver' directory to the root directory.

from the command prompt

ndiswrapper -i LSBCMNDS.inf (installs the driver)
ndiswrapper -l (displays driver info, confirms above worked)
modprobe ndiswrapper (no idea)
ndiswrapper -m (writes config for modprobe above)

iwconfig showed me that my driver was now loaded, my card was present and configured. From what Im seeing on the forum where I found this stuff, it looks like the following will have to be run from iwconfig to get the card to connect to the wireless network. I'll try this later.

iwconfig wlan0 essid MyNetwork
iwconfig wlan0 channel 11
ifconfig wlan0 up
ifup wlan0
pump

Anyone have anything to add. Anything I should watch out for?

TIA