Ive got a new laptop (oooooo new toys)
its a Novatech Revo Max with a Core Duo 1.83Ghz chip and 2GB of RAM. Very nice, works great with Feisty except that the wireless isnt working.
Novatech tell me that the card is an Intel 3945ABG, and everywhere I can find references to this card on the net suggests that its just supposed to work with Feisty, but mine doesnt
It picks up that there is a wireless card, and can even see networks but it cannot join them. It denies all knowledge of WPA encryption, and just refuses to connect to anything with WEP or no encryption.
Although it picks up that I have a wireless card, Feisty doesnt know what it is and isnt using a restricted driver for it. I get the impression that it is supposed to know about the Intel 3945ABG and use a restricted driver, but the restricted drivers manager says none are needed.
Im beginning to suspect that Novatech are lying to me and its not an intel wireless card at all, does anyone have any idea what to do? Im stumped.
Are you using Network Manager? Its the good one that gives you a dropdown list of available networks etc. so you just click to join. earlier versions of ubuntu didnt use it but i can remember if feisty does. Failing that , ubuntuforums are usually a good place to look.
yeah feisty has network manager, gives a very pretty menu which does nothing useful (can select the wireless network to join but it fails to join)
I now think the Novatech man was lying to me, and its an MSI wireless card running the RT73 chipset. Apparently the drivers which ship with Feisty are buggy as the plague of locusts, and the official ones (for which I found a how-to on Ubuntu forums) wont compile.
Just trying some synaptic packages, but dont hold out much hope.
SUCCESS!!!!
Im now using the CVS drivers from serialmonkeys as per this how to
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=400236
seems to be working at least for now, though net manager is out the window I have to do the setup manually.
Im now off to have words with the people at Novatech who had me barking up the wrong tree for 3 hours this morning, not impressed! the lappy is first class, but so far the service leaves something to be desired.
unix systems are still really poor for wireless networking support... ive tried suze, ubuntu and redhat and none of them work with my wireless card (albeit a really really bad 3rd party one)
it seems to be just a case of getting the right drivers installed. If your card really old or uses a bizarre chipset you might be out of luck but try this
get the device id by running lspci or lsusb (depending where it is plugged in), then google the device id (a two strings of 4 hex characters, like 0db0:6887 or similar)
thats what finally put me on the winning path with mine.
Linux has come a long way in terms of hardware support since I first started playing with SuSE 7. Theres a long way still to go, but its now at a point where enough people are able to use it that the big hardware vendors are starting to take notice. Intel have officially sanctioned Linux drivers for their WiFi chips for example, as do RALink (although the latter doesnt actually seem to work, at least not on my box). That sort of thing would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
My wireless works fine in Linux (RT73 USB). :)
For any wireless adapters there arent drivers in the kernel (http://kernel.org/) for yet, ndiswrapper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NdisWrapper) usually works for most people.