wireless card pain

[Jaegar]

After 3 hours of work I give up. All I have to do to hijack our wired internet connection is grab the ethernet cable from the other computer but I can't get my wireless connection to work in any form.

As I mentioned before I'm running the latest version of Ubuntu. I successfully installed the Windows XP drivers for my card using ndiswrapper and all the instructions I've found in my searches say it should work perfectly now. The problem is that it's not.

I've been through this
help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/Ndiswrapper#head-c56fc5048c5960e2a60b86c436bdf341c95ba346
and all the related guides (including the step-by-step command line installation XP) up to the point where I'm supposed to go to the network settings manager and configure my wireless network. There's no wireless network in the manager. I've tried restarting the computer and moving the card between PCI slots repeatedly, but nothing makes it show up as a wireless networking device.

When I first installed the card and driver it said the hardware wasn't present. I moved the card to a different PCI slot and now it agrees the hardware for the installed driver is there. Somewhere in there the system is missing the driver and wireless card (which are both properly installed). Right now I'm thinking that maybe if I used a different driver that would help. I'm out of ideas and in need of sleep. bye now...

oh, last note. It's a Trendnet TEW-423PI

[Yoon]

The biggest pain with Ubuntu is wireless setups, unfortunately.

With a lot of these wireless cards out there, the most important thing for Linux users is to determine what chipset (not the manufacturer/brand) the wireless card is using.

Doing some Googling, it appears that the TEW-423PI uses a few different chipsets, depending on the firmware version (this can be found on the label on your TEW-423PI, i.e. A, B1, C1, etc.).

www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-wireless-networking-41/trendnet-tew-423pi-versionc1-no-signal-633765/
ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=3796
www.quietearth.us/articles/2007/01/19/TrendNet-TEW423PI-working-in-linux

If your TEW-423PI is a "A" (Texus Instruments) or "C1" (Realtek), you're in luck, as the TI & Realtek chipsets have native Linux drivers, which you could use instead of using the NDIS wrapper. Can you check your firmware version?

[Jaegar]

Yeah, it was pulling up all the stats like the chipset and stuff with one of the command line thingies I was using to look at settings. If our internet connection is working when I get home (it wasn't when I left for work XP) I'll check those solutions out. Thanks for the help.

yeeeeheheheehehehehehehee ^____^

It works. After hours of googling, typing or copy/pasting command lines from 3-4 different driver projects and community revisions, and watching errors and warnings fly through the terminal screen without success I found one driver that works (and is working as I type ^_^).

willdaniels.co.uk/articles/howto-guides/10-howto/12-r8180-hardy

That one page is deceptively simple. By itself, it holds everything I used to get my card to work. Thanks for the lead Yoon! If I hadn't known to look for drivers based on the chipset I would've been at this for days XP

[Yoon]

No problem, glad to be of help.