None of the network components work on my Dell Inspiron 6000

**jacksonon** · 12-10-2005, 09:47 PM

I have Knoppix 3.6 (I tried 3.8.1 but the keyboard and touchpad stopped working after the part where you can enter boot cheat codes) and the laptop boots fine, screen, touchpad and keyboard works but none of the network components work.

This laptop has an Intel Pro/Wireless 2915ABG built in network card and a Broadcom 440x 10/100 integrated network controller.

Neither of these work when I boot up my computer, the broadcom network card is recognized but it isn't picking up the IP address from my router and when I run the network configuration utility it doesn't work.

I tried running NDISWRAPPER on the .inf file found in the intel folder but it didn't work. I tried following that site with the linux versions of the drivers but it is too complicated for me, maybe someone knows a noobie guide to it. (http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/index.php

Thanks a lot.

**Harry Kuhman** · 12-10-2005, 10:03 PM

My expectations are low that the wired NIC will work, even lower with an old version of KNoppix, but the wired should work and indeed from what you are telling us it does, it just doesn't do DHCP properly.

What is the make and model of the router? That may be very important for us to determine why you are not doing DHCP.

I have seen a Belkin router that would not DHCP with Knoppix, but one could still go into Netcardconfig and do a manual setup.

If you have a feature in the router that only allows certain MAC addresses to connect and you have that enabled, disable it. Do this even if the same computer can connect from Windows on the same NIC. Trust me on this for now, I don't have time to explain fully right now.

Can you manually set the information in Netcardconfig if you answer the DHCP question negative? If not what wrrors do you see? What error do you get when you try to use DHCP?

As a next resort, you might try watching the connection with ethereal (included with Knoppix) and seeing how far the DHCP handshake gets. That may give us some insight on the problem.

3.6 should work. It's not clear to me what your problem with 3.8.1 was, although DMA was on by default with that release and not with 3.6. There were a number of bugs in 3.8 and we've come a way since then, you very well may want to give 4.0.2 a try.

Tell us about the rest of your network as well as the make and model of router, this may assist us in giving you more things to try.

**jacksonon** · 12-10-2005, 10:21 PM

I have a Dlink DI-604 router, I will boot into Knoppix and watch with ethereal. Should I be using any cheats codes or just boot normally.

**jacksonon** · 12-10-2005, 10:44 PM

ethereal doesn't see eth0 and i tried the network setup, first i sais yes to use DHCP broadcast and it didnt work, then said no and entered all the info and it didnt work either.

**Harry Kuhman** · 12-11-2005, 02:43 AM

Since you have 2 network devices, one wireless, it's not clear to me which Knoppix is calling eth0 and which it's calling eth1 (assuming that it's calling one eth1). If the wireless nic is eth0 thns I'm not expecting it to work. You might have better luck with 4.0.2, but even then I don't know if a new version of Knoppix supports that interface. And in any case you would have to do some extra setup before you could get DHCP to work (can't talk wirelessly until you set up SSID, WEP and such). If you can determine where the wired NIC is and if it turns out to be on eth1 then that is the one I would suggest trying to get to work, at least for now and with that old version of Knoppix. See man netcardconfig in a shell for options that should help you use eth1. If it turns out that you can determine that the wired nic is eth0 then I'm not at all clear to me why DHCP would fail or why you couldn't manually set up the NIC with netcardconfig (I can). By the way, I've use Knoppix with a Dlink-604 and it worked fine (there are, of course, different firmware versions, but I doubt very much if that's the issue). I had asked about the rest of the network and also what errors you were getting, but you didn't respond. My thinking was that after a manual configuration you should be able to ping other members of the network (assuming that you don't have a firewall blocking this). It would be helpful to know if you are actually configuring the interface and for some reason the Dlink doesn't want to talk to you, or if no one wants to talk to you and it's not configured at all. Without knowing errors or network configuration I don't know what more I can say.

What does ethereal see?

**jacksonon** · 12-11-2005, 03:40 AM

ethereal says nothing, it doesnt see the network adapter. what other details do you need about the network? i can use my NIC in windows but not in linux.

**Harry Kuhman** · 12-11-2005, 07:30 AM

Originally Posted by jacksonon

.... the broadcom network card is recognized but it isn't picking up the IP address from my router....

Originally Posted by jacksonon

ethereal says nothing, it doesnt see the network adapter.....

I don't understand what is happening. You say the card is recognized, but then you say that ethereal doesn't see it. In my experience, ethereal will let you watch any network device that Knoppix detects, even if it doesn't have an IP address or other DHCP setup; I've debugged problems with a Belkin router in just this way. If ethereal really can't see it then I'm wondering why you say the broadcom network card is recognized and if we need to back up a bit. I don't know anything about that chipset but Knoppix is pretty good about recognizing 10/100 controlers. Perhaps you are hurting yourself by sticking with 3.6, which could be too old for this chipset.

**jacksonon** · 12-11-2005, 07:52 PM

Ok I downloaded Knoppix 4.0.2 and now my network card works, I am using it right now. I used ndiswrapper for my wireless card and everything worked and when I typed iwlist scan I could see the networks around my house. However, when I open Ethereal, it doesn't see ANY network device, not my NIC or wireless card. However, if I open Airsnort, it can see the interfaces (eth0 is my wireless card) I select eth0 and click scan and nothing happens, no errors or any data shown. I know that my wireless card has its own linux driver made available by a group and I researched it a bit and found that the command is apt-get ipw2200-source but it says it is not found. I find the websites instructions very difficult to follow so it would be nice just to use the built in apt-get feature.[/list]