Wireless works on LiveCD, not on HD. Why?

**ajis** · 12-26-2005, 02:00 AM

I have a Dell Inspiron 1000 (about a year old) and a Dell Wireless 1350 pcmcia 802.11 b/g card, model Wl-611GD. The Knoppix Live CD ran beautifully, and getting the wireless to work was as simple as any tutorial: run ndiswrapper, pick bcmwl5a.inf for my card, setup the SSID info, grab DHCP, then surf. Inspired, I got rid of Windows XP altogether and formatted/partitioned the drive. I ran into problems trying to install the CD to the HD as Knoppix, so I went to the "recommended" of Debian.

Now I'm having issues. I made sure pcmcia/cardmgr was running at boot (default, so yes). Then I typed:

Code:

ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf

No errors. Good.

Code:

ndiswrapper -l
bcmwl5a driver present, hardware present

Still looking good.

At this point, I noticed the dim lights on my pcmcia wireless card stayed dim, whereas they became bright when I was at this step on the Live CD. Note, I used the GUI ndiswrapper on the Live CD, whereas I don't have the GUI after having this installed, so I'm going command line.

I tried:

Code:

ndiswrapper -m

No errors.

Code:

ifconfig

Only lo is displayed. Odd, because I have built-in ethernet, too.

Code:

iwconfig

This shows me lo and eth0, both saying, "no wireless extensions." Where's the wlan0?

I tried:

Code:

dmesg | grep ndis

Didn't return anything.

I then removed my pcmcia card, and retried:

Code:

ndiswrapper -l
bcmwl5a driver present

It recogonizes the hardware is no longer present.

Out of desperation, I tried pump -i eth0, pump -i wlan0, netconfig, wlanconfig, and waveconfig - all gave me errors about wireless not found or something to that effect. Last I rebooted and repeated several of the above commands. Nothing.

Where am I going wrong?