iwconfig doesn't show wireless pc card

[danio]

I'm trying to get my D-Link DWL-G630 working under knoppix.

I've installed knoppix 4 to HDD (yes it's old but I read in these forums that 5 has some problems with wireless so I don't think it will help).
After downloading a new copy of pci.ids from pciids.sourceforge.net my card shows nicely in lspci:

0000:02:00.0 Network controller: RaLink RT2561/RT61 rev B 802.11g
	Subsystem: D-Link System Inc DWL-G630 Rev E
	Flags: slow devsel, IRQ 11
	Memory at 10800000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [disabled] [size=32K]
	Capabilities: <available only to root>

I used ndiswrapper with the NetRt61G.inf (and rt61.cat and rt61.sys) files that came on the driver CD and ndiswrapper -l seems happy:

Installed ndis drivers:
netrt61g	driver present, hardware present

However iwconfig cannot see the card:

lo     no wireless extensions

I also see no pccard messages in dmesg when I insert or remove the card

I tried modeprobe ndiswrapper as suggested in http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=112715 but that command never returns. This seems like a serious problem but I don't know what...

The machine has no wired network btw.

The card works OK in OS X.

Thanks for any pointers people can offer.

Danio

[Harry Kuhman]

I've installed knoppix 4 to HDD (yes it's old but I read in these forums that 5 has some problems with wireless so I don't think it will help).

Knoppix just has poor wifi support. I have several Dlink cards that Knoppix has never recognized, but other live CDs do (Puppy Linux and Mandriva1 come to mind, although I expect BacKTrack 3 might recognize the cards also, never tried it with these cards. These are not your exact model card, and Dlink likes to change the chipset even when they use the same model number card, so I really can't say if other distros will support your card or not.

For Live CDs I would suggest trying Puppy Linux, BackTrack and Mandriva and see if any of them like the card. If they work then you can be pretty assured that the card is fine, Linux is fine, you know what you are doing and Knoppix is failing.

I also would take exception at your mentioning that you installed Knoppix to hard disk. Heck, even wired networking very frequently fails after "installing" Knopppix. I would not expect wifi to work at all, and certainly not if it didn't work when running from the CD or DVD. If you want a hard disk installed system then I would suggest using a distro that is intended and suitable for hard disk install. Normally I would suggest Debian, but sometimes shopping between distros is a good way to get the herdware support that you need. No hard in trying a quick Debian install, but if you can determine that your card isn't supported by any of the Debain versions (check by both model number and version number if you try looking it up rather than empirical testing) , then Mandriva or even a distro that I usually hesitate to suggest Ubuntu or Kubuntu might suit you. Is there any reason at all for fighting with a Knoppix hard disk "install", particularly when you see that you are already having wifi problems with Knoppix?

By the way, I normally recommend doing a business card install or a Net install of Debian, but if your computer has no hard wire ethernet and must use wifi to network, the downloading and burning the ISO of disk #1 of the Debian flavor of your choice is the best bet. I would normally suggest the "testing" version and avoid the "stable version". If testing does not include the driver that you need, then you could look to "unstable", which is more bleeding edge and might include a newer driver.
You don't need or want a full set of discs, the first disc should be enough and let you get on the Internet (if it is going to work at all), after that you can install anything needed from the rest of the discs from the Internet, but will be asked for your disc if you try to install anything else that is on Disc #1.

[danio]

I expected that by now peripheral support would be pretty much equal in all the distros as I thought they are just packaging components up, but I guess I have oversimplified (in my mind) what goes into building a distro!

I was trying the knoppix live CD mainly because I burnt it a while ago to try on a different windows laptop and was impressed by it then. But on this old relic (366MHz, 128MB RAM) the CD drive is so noisy and slow it was frustrating so I did a knoppix-install.

The big problem for me now is there are so many distros and I've lost track of the linux scene so I didn't really know where to start, and I would end up with a lot of coasters trying them all as the laptop can't read CD-RWs... Your comments have been really helpful. I avoided debian because when I tried it last (prob a few years ago) it was quite painful to get all the components and hardware support installed, especially in comparison to suse; also when I went to the site last night there are something like 15 CDs plus kde and some others and I wasn't sure which CDs I would need to get wifi up & running. I tried ubuntu but it takes so long to load the CD on the old laptop that I figured it is probably not the best distro for such hardware.

I will give debian 'testing' a go, and if no luck try some of the others you mentioned. Thanks again,

Danio

[danio]

Quick update in case anyone else comes along in future with the same issues.

I tried debian testing 2008/Oct/6 but that wouldn't get pas the device detection stage of the installer (probably something strange in the laptop - an old Dell Latitide CPi A-series).

So I got puppy linux 4.1, ran ndiswrapper -i NetRt61G.INF then iwconfig can see wlan0.
Then I ran the puppy connect tool which finds my wlan no problem and I am typing this on puppy.

It seems like a really nice distro for limited resource machines. I'm not sure that I like the lack of user accounts but maybe I'll get used to that...