iwlist seems broken

brokenflea · 11-04-2005, 11:37 PM

iwlist was working fine for me until i did a recent kernel upgrade to 2.6.14, and now everytime i type in
iwlist wlan0 scan

in the CLI it comes up with

Code:

wlan0     Interface doesn't support scanning : Bad address

anything else with iwlist wlan0 works, e.g.
if i type in iwlist wlan0 freq, it'll bring up all the frequencies,

etc.

if anyone has an idea on what might be happening, i'd be glad to get some answers.

TIA

rkelsen · 11-05-2005, 01:31 AM

Which wireless driver are you using?

brokenflea · 11-05-2005, 02:37 AM

ndiswrapper and its a netgear wg511 pc card, marvell chipset, made in taiwan (v2).

brokenflea · 11-06-2005, 02:53 PM

ok, it looks like the problem was with the new ndiswrapper (1.5) source that i had installed. i tried to go back to ndiswrapper-1.1 on 2.6.14 but the compile didn't work as well. so i'm back to 2.6.10 with ndiswrapper-1.1 , and iwlist works fine. i'm going to stay on to 2.6.10 until a couple of months or until i can either buy a cisco pc card or an orinoco.

Hangdog42 · 11-07-2005, 07:31 AM

Actually this sort of problem started with the 2.6.13 kernel. The kernel team introduced a new version of wireless extensions that the Wireless Tools only supports in beta. The official Slacware 10.2 wireless tools package is a touch older so it doesn't support the 2.6.13 or 2.6.14 kernels at all. So you either need to compile your own package of wireless tools or you need to stick to a 2.6.12 or earlier kernel.

vdemuth · 11-07-2005, 11:35 AM

Any more on this at all. As I have been using Ndiswrapper with Kernel 2.6.11 for some time with no problems, but having upgraded to 2.6.14, and ndiswrapper to version 1.5, I can see the AP using the iwlist command, the correct driver for the card is loaded, and the interface (wlan0) is up, but I just cannot, whatever I try, get an ip address using dhcpcd.
Not a problem in itself as I am happy to maintain the status quo as it stands. It would just be nice to know, so that I can try out thr latest kernel.

Hangdog42 · 11-07-2005, 12:02 PM

My understanding (and I reserve the right to be wrong) is that you need wireless tools version 28 to support the newer kernels. If you look at the Wireless Tools site, version 28 is still in beta. I'm assuming that the beta status is why Slackware still hase version 27, even in current.

I suppose it wouldn't be that hard to try and tweak the Slackbuild script for version 28 and see if that works.

brokenflea · 11-08-2005, 08:38 AM

yeah, that makes a lot of sense. i did try to compile the latest wireless tools when i was using 2.6.14 but got some errors during make, so i just let it go and didn't pursue it any further than that. everything works on 2.6.14 with iwlist except scanning for neighboring AP's.