Re: WiFi under Linux - rant no 7
- From: Timothy Murphy <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 13:58:47 +0000
Unruh wrote:
Why can't Linux tell me that it hears a remote system,
but I have to give the correct WEP code,
as Windows does?
It does
iwlist s
will list all of the AP the card can find. Under encryption, on means you
need a WEP key. The essid is listed (or hidden in which case you have to
know it.)
Sadly, that's simply not true.
iwlist only lists the machine I am actually connected to.
windows can see 3 APs at this moment.
---------------------------------
[tim@martha ~]$ sudo iwlist eth0 s
eth0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 02:02:2D:4A:52:80
ESSID:"maths.tcd.ie"
Mode:Ad-Hoc
Frequency:2.457 GHz (Channel 10)
Signal level:-77 dBm Noise level:-96 dBm
Encryption key:on
---------------------------------
I know from the flashing light on my laptop card
if I turn off my desktop
that Linux also sees one at least of these APs.
But iwlist shows nothing.
Also, if I give the wrong WEP key then iwlist shows nothing.
Although I usually use Fedora, this issue has nothing to do with that.
My rant actually came from setting up WiFi on an old ThinkPad I bought
last weekend, which was running Slax with vmware .
I found it quite hard to work out how vmware-player worked,
but that is a different issue.
An old computer with an old operating system? Hmm, I seem to have a lot of
trouble setting up wifi on my Commodore 80 as well.
The operating system is not old:
---------------------------------
tim@slax:~$ cat /etc/slackware-version
Slackware 10.1.0
tim@slax:~$ uname -a
Linux slax 2.6.12.2 #1 SMP Sat Jan 28 17:12:56 GMT 2006 i686 unknown unknown
GNU/Linux
---------------------------------
Incidentally, I had no choice in operating system -
this is what the machine came with,
and until I had WiFi set up I had no way of changing it.
As it happened I quite like Slax (and vmware)
and will probably continue to run them on this laptop
if I can sort out some issues with installing Slax "modules".
What annoyed me was that when I had vmware set up,
and my WiFi card was working, to the extent that the light on it
was flashing, indicating that it was receiving and sending packets,
there was no obvious indication of why it was not linking to my LAN.
I found in the end that the WEP key was being read in ASCII,
rather than hex, because I had used lower case abcdef.
So my machine knew what I wanted to link to,
and had exchanged packets with that machine.
Why then didn't it tell me what the problem was?
Probably because you did not ask it.
Apparently you finally did.
I did not "ask it".
It simply occurred to me that it might want the WEP hex key
with capital ABCDEF (I used lowercase because that worked in Windows),
and when I changed it - with iwconfig as you suggest -
it worked.
My point (you seem to be deliberately misunderstanding this)
is that Linux did not tell me, as Windows does,
that it could see the device I was trying to link to,
but that I had given the wrong key.
I repeat, Linux does not do a good job of helping you
if you have a problem with WiFi.
Several people seem to feel they have answered this complaint
by saying that they don't have any problems with WiFi.
Great. Then the issue does not arise for you.
But it is apparent from this newsgroup that lots of people
_do_ have problems with WiFi,
and it is their problems I am talking about.
--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
.
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