Hey, iwlist wlan0 scan shows an access point but dhclient wlan0 will just try DHCPDISCOVER a few times. This is on a debian machine using ndiswrapper - when i tried in MEPIS dhcp was configured just fine. Any help,thanks.

Did you check the output of 'iwconfig wlan0' to make sure the essid, AP, mode, wep etc are input correctly?

There is no WEP or ESSID or any settings that aren't default (insecure I know, but hey I guess my school doesn't care) and a distro like MEPIS which set up ndiswrapper automatically for me and has:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp


in /etc/network/interfaces, will get me connected without me having to do anything.
Should I be using something other than DHCLIENT to get an ip address for this wireless interface?

I have always used dhcpcd, it's default for Slackware.

ok, so you're using a debian (-based) distro now and not Mepis, so the wireless interface is not automatically set for you? This means that you probably have to manually configure the parameters for wlan0 with iwconfig. Since the essid and wep are default, you could try to input the correct AP and mode (obtained from the iwlist scan) via iwconfig.

# iwconfig wlan0 ap xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

or

# iwconfig wlan0 ap auto

# iwconfig wlan0 mode <whatever it is>

then try dhclient again

# dhclient wlan0

Yup.....I am using debian on my laptop, setting the AP to auto or to the ap's hardware address does sound like it should let wlan0 know where to go in order to send the dhcp request that dhclient does. I can't try it out right now because I am not at school and have no other wireless networks to use right now, but will try that once I get back there tomorrow, thanks for your replies.

EDIT: the odd thing is, MEPIS has essid set to 'any', ap set to auto and mode set to auto, yet it can still get an ip adress from dhcp just fine. Whereas in Debian, I have the exact same settings (I just double checked) and iwlist will show me an access point, but when I run dhclient to get an address for my wireless interface, I get nothing. The only difference I see in settings between MEPIS and Debian is that MEPIS has wlan0 autoconfigured for dhcp in /etc/network/interfaces, but in Debian I am using dhclient. I am still going to specify the exact details in iwconfig using what I get from iwlist, and if no luck with that , will try to add wlan0 to /etc/network/interfaces. I will see how things go.