I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but I've tried searching for info on the net and I'm not finding it.

I quit on the previous version of Ubuntu because I couldn't get ndiswrapper to work, but this version acts as if it recognizes my wireless card and detects my network, I just can't get it to actually connect. It always gives a 0% rate on the signal, and determined playing with the setting under either roaming or manual configuration has had no effect.

I'm using a linksys wap54G access point in bridge mode (to an old but effective 2-wire gateway modem), with a linksys pci wireless card in my pc; the network is the default name (linksys), with wpa-psk encryption using TKIP encryption - to my mind that should translate over to a shared key, with wep encryption using my passphrase, but I've tried various configurations to no effect.

Either it just looks like it's recognizing my card, or I'm missing something obvious, but I'd really like to move over to Ubuntu for everything but games if I can figure this out. it's not like 75% of my software isn't GPL'd anyway - <G>

Thank you in advance - Jonnan

Wireless in GNU/Linux can be tough! First please check if the WL adapter you use has a WL chipset that is supported. Atheros has good support with the madwifi drivers. I didn't have much trouble with getting wireless to work on PCLinuxOS .93 and earlier as long as I used a Atheros based PCI or USB WL network adapter, Compex WLP54G
Compex WLU54G respectively. I did have minor problems which I was able to resolve by posting and getting answers in the PCLinuxOS forums (unfortunately their site/forum is down as of now).
http://madwifi.org/ is a site you could look up. Another helpful site is http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/...itle=Main_Page
Hope I have been of some help!
In the brave GNU world hard work really pays off. Give ya a serious 'high' of having got something working.

Okay, I'm only semi-competent from the hardware standpoint - I build systems, they work well, but I don't even try to build bleeding edge stuff and I couldn't begin to tell you what the chipset was. According to Ubuntu's help forums the Linksys WMP54G should be working automatically, which makes sense to me as it is detecting the network by name.

What's not happening is that it's not actually connecting to the network, and it's not giving me any indicators as to why it doesn't want to do so - just fails without an error for me to google.

I'm comfortable with a commandline, but I'm not a sysadmin by any stretch, and without connecting to the internet, Ubuntu is not terribly useful to me.

Thanks - Jonnan

Just a thought, but is your particular Linksys WMP54G a version that uses the BCM43XX chip set?? I have a Linksys PCI card that has been produced in many different forms using different chip sets. My version happens to be a BCM43XX version. Feisty is the first version of Ubuntu that has made installing the proper drivers for those cards easy to install. It doesn't work "out-of-the-box", but it is easy to configure. Try following the instructions at this link.

Ndiswrapper for Broadcom 43XX

I followed the instructions and had my wireless card working in minutes. It was VERY painless! I hope this helps.

To tell you my story (sorry about its length though) I am having similar problems on doing a upgrade from
Kubuntu 6.06 --> 6.10 --> 7.04. My Compex WLP54G PCI network adapter can see the network SSID and link upto it but fails on picking up a ip from my dhcp server. I figured this by running the Live version of Kubuntu 7.04. When I check the logs (use sudo tail -f /var/log/messages at the command line 'konsole') I see the following when I click the access point showing in my knetworkmanager applet in the tray and go through with adding my WEP key etc
ubuntu dhcdbd: message handler not found under /com/redhat/dhcp/ath0.dbus.get.reason
ubuntu kernel: [ 422.557956] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): ath0: link becomes ready
ubuntu dhcdbd: Unrequested down ?:3

Since I have had trouble with trying to make WPA-PSK work in GNU/Linux I use WEP. This worked for me as follows in Kubuntu 6.06 & 6.10 as well as 7.04. I had 'wlassistant' installed. I configured wlassistant with my WEP key and once I booted up into my GUI I would have to use wlassistant to connect to my wireless network. I am having problems with my GUI after doing a online upgrade to Kubuntu 7.04. I have a early nForce based board and had nVidia drivers installed via 'automatix'. The online upgrade brought that driver up to speed too. But unfortunately the x server is not behaving consistently. Lots of video corruption and spontaneous restarts. Got to fix that. But I did manage to get it to run (before it spontaneously restarts) and noticed that 'wlassistant' worked as mentioned above. So one route you could try is get a hold of the wlassistant package from here http://packages.ubuntu.com/feisty/kde/wlassistant. Better you have the universe repos setup and apt-get it. All dependencies will be installed by apt. That probably means you have to wire your pc to you network under your circustances.

Pop the card in the PCMCIA slot.
Then run "tail" on the /var/log/messages file to see if any messages appear that can give you a clue.

Sorry I think we are discussing a PC. As far as I know no PC has a 'PCMCIA' slot as standard.

Opps, I made the assumption that the wireless card was PCMCIA ... now I see that it is a PCI card.

One thing different about 7.04 compared to it's predecessors is that it by default loads the Gnome Network Manager. If you have tried to use another like wifi-radar the two will interfere with each other. Don't know that's your issue but it's worth a check.

Well, I figured two things out (I may not have details right, posting from work),

1 - the card is locked into channel one, and iwconfig will *not* put it into another channel. My WAP is set into channel 6.

2 - the lshw command shows the wireless card (with rt2500 driver), but the lspci doesn't list it at all, driver, or even physical presence.

3rd - it has occurred to me that maybe it's stupid for me to assume that the wireless connection would work the same running it from the cd image as running from an installed copy - I had been running from cd on the theory that I'll install when I'm sure I can get things to work, but if that's an idiot's assumption perhaps someone should tell me now?

Thanks - Jonnan