Wireless Saga

[Jim Herrmann]

I've been trying to go wireless lately.  I bought a Netgear WAP router 
and card.  The router works fine.  The card had a Realtec chip set, and 
so no driver is simply available for Linux.  I would have had to compile 
one, but I have neither the kernel source nor a compiler on this old 
laptop.  I wanted something that would just work, so I took the Netgear 
back and got a Linksys.  It had a Realtec chipset also, so I traded it 
back in right away, and tried the D-Link.  It had some funky TI chipset 
and some searching on the internet revealed that the version I had 
simply does not work with Linux.  I'll be taking that one back on 
Saturday.  In the mean time, I found an SMC2532W-B card at Nebraska 
Furniture Mart that has the Prism chipset, so the Orinoco drivers loaded 
straight away.  Yippee!  Almost.

The driver loads, and the card comes up as wlan0, but doesn't get an 
address from the WAP.  I booted over to Win2K, installed the drivers, 
inserted the card, and viola, it works as advertised, which pisses me 
off no end.  Back over on linux, I'm stuck.  I tried:
"dhcpcd wlan0"

which thinks a bit, then says
"dhcpcd-hook: Skipping 'ifdown $INTERFACE -o dhcp' all"

If I try "ifup wlan0" it says:
"Starting DHCP Client Daemon on wlan0... . . . . . . . . . . . no IP 
address yet... backgrounding"

Any suggestions for me to try?

Thanks,
Jim

-- 
LEARNapalooza: A Homeschooling Experience
Memorial Day Weekend - 2004
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