Wireless in Debian

[Thinka]

Is it me or is it easier to configure a home network in XP than to setup a wireless adapter in Debian??? I've read through various online resources about iwconfig, ifconfig, linux_wan, orinoco but I still don't get it. And more importantly I couldn't get it to work!

Is Ubuntu easier, in which case I might just install that. I only went for Debian because:

1) Seeing as Ubuntu is based on it, I thought it would be better to use the "base" model if you like;
2) I preferred the default Blue Theme :$. Although if I can get the blue theme on Ubuntu, then I might just install that instead...

[Xlphos]

Have you looked at NDISwrapper?

[sillyboy]

It is going to differ depending on your wireless device. On my laptop, the wireless worked straight away (Ubuntu 8.10).

[Thinka]

My bad, I should have said:

I've got a PCI card, which is a Netgear MA311, and I've got a USB adapter, which is a Netgear Rangemax WPN111.

Have you looked at NDISwrapper?

Tell me more about this NDISwrapper pls

It is going to differ depending on your wireless device. On my laptop, the wireless worked straight away (Ubuntu 8.10).

That's cool, I suspected that Ubuntu might be easier, but I'm desperately trying to use the less linux-newbie-friendly in the hope that I'll learn more. And I AM learning, it's just that the main lesson seems to be "Debian is no picnic in the park".

[Xlphos]

You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NdisWrapper.

I have seen a similar situation here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-wireless-networking-41/netgear-wpn111-wireless-setup-ubuntu-8.4-651429/.

Hope this helps.

[Thinka]

Thanks mate, I'll check it out

[JeoSaurus]

Debian is the ORIGINAL "picnic in the park"!!! Apt is the greatest invention ever!

Okay, but seriously. If you want to stick with Debian, which I support completely, look into ndiswrapper. Typically, the hard part of getting a wireless adapter to work in Linux is getting the right driver installed. Some of them are open source, and are therefore supported out of the box, but many of the more popular chipsets are still not "free".

Check to see what chipset your card uses with "lspci". You might be able to grep it out like this:

lspci | grep -i net

That might narrow down the search for a driver. ndiswrapper is a tool that uses the Windows version of the driver. There's another tool called fwcutter that helps to extract those drivers from the Windows installers.

-G

[rm_daniweb]

type:

lspci -vv | less and look for the chips number and vendor.

from that you will know what driver are you going to install.
Some wireless card are using the same chips but they are just different in manufacturer's name.