Quote Originally Posted by Charlie Foxtrot View Post
I was able to get it to work by using a different USB port on the same USB/PCI card, not sure what was wrong with the other one.
Hi Charlie Foxtrot,

Glad to hear you have got it working.

I think you may have been trying too hard. If you are using the Network Manager then it should just work without you fiddling around with iwconfig and stuff (the wiki page you have been using is old). In fact, your fiddling may explain why it didn't work until you tried another USB port ...

If you fiddle with the configuration of a network interface at the command line the Network Manager may decide you don't want it to manage the interface and so you are on your own.

One possibility:

First time you plug it in, Linux sees your adapter and names it wlan0, which you have fiddled with, so the Network Manager ignores it. Plug your adapter into another port and Linux may see this as wlan1, which you haven't fiddled with, so the Network Manager handles it and it all appears to work.

Another possibility:

When you unplugged you adapter, Linux removed all your fiddling so when you plugged the adapter back in, the Network Manger was happy and so were you.

I think the second is more likely but I can't see over your shoulder. Have a look in the file /etc/network/interfaces. The Network Manager is inclined to ignore any interface declared in here. The only one you should find in here is loopback.

I'm not aware of any other configuration files in /etc that iwconfig et al use or that may put the Network Manager off but you may want to sweep under /etc for files that contain the string wlan0. You probably want to remove any iwconfig stuff you've added to knoppix.sh or /etc/rc.local.

Alternatively, if you are not using the Network Manager .... well I have done that using just /etc/network/interfaces with no iwconfig at all but quite what you do depends on whether your WLAN is using WEP or WPA etc.