wireless connects in graphical mode but not in Adrianne

I am setting up my father's laptop - he has been blind since birth (age 91). I have recently installed Adriane after our isp changed all the parameters and I could no longer use LinuxSpeaks.

A friend of mine had helped me figure how to get email working (no real directions on how to get it to work) and we set it up to comply with the provider's IMAP and SMTP parameters after tweaking it to use sendmail. After about 4 hours of work he was able to get it to connect to his wireless and we got it send/receive email successfully and the internet accessed fine.

Now I am at my house - and the computer recognizes my wireless router when in the graphical mode but not when in the text-based Adriane. I have gone through the steps more than several dozen times - the setup recognizes the card, recognizes the router, the configuration has saved the wep password but I just cannot get it to connect. I have disabled the wired card but it still will not connect. I am new to the Linux world and have used the PCLinuxOS distro for years but primarily in the gui realm, so if you have a suggestion please explain it as if I were brand new to the linux world.

I have gone into the gui and have done a synaptic update after limiting the repositories, but the changes made did not help the situation. I hesitate to load a newer distribution after all the changes he made to get it to work.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

@ Banks

Please be patient;
remember some of our experts are on a different time.

Hi,

I hope this is not getting the wrong end of the stick ...

The Network Manager (Applet 0.8.1) that comes with Knoppix has a drawback that it only works if you have run up a GUI desktop. It has (as I discovered recently while trying to install Debian) the drawback that it is incompatible with the mechanisms one might expect to use when one isn't running a GUI desktop.

After a humiliating exchange of e-mails with the Debian maintainer for Network Manager, I discovered that an alternative is available from the Debian squeeze repository (which I believe is the one Knoppix uses). The advantage I saw to this alternative is that it will bring up the network in both non-GUI and the other mode. It is named wicd.

I have it running on one laptop (under Debain) and some notes scribbled on a scrap of paper somewhere that I need to go through so that I can do it properly next time.

You will definitely need to un install the current Network Manager, which could be tricky if you are dependent on your wireless to install the new one !

I got my inspiration from the following web page: http://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse.

If you can manage to get wicd going on your own, let us know. If you can't I'll try to help but I will be ad-libbing things a bit.

@Banks

You did not write what version of Knoppix you use.

cnetworkmanager is a command-line client for NetworkManager. You can find a Debian package in the repository. Maybe you should try it out before you remove the whole NetworkManager.