Wireless Network not Detected Please Help

Dave458

Unfortunately I have found that wireless support is rather spotty. I use Fedora, but searching around to solve my problems revealed the scattered state of the art.

You need to know something about the chipset in your wireless card and from there attempt to find a linux native driver to support it. For example my D-Link DWL-G630 card uses the Atheros chipset which is supported by the MadWiFi driver. A native driver is preferred in my minds because if that search fails, then ndiswrapper is the fallback that allows you to use the vendor provided windows driver. Ndiswrapper does work, but because of the variability of vendor proprietary windows drivers, some kernel parameter tuning and or rebuild may be needed.

buttuming you get past that, then there are several ways to get the "list of Wireless Networks available" functionality you desire. NetworkManager does what you want, but is under continued improvements as we speak and has a spotty reputation (to be fair, some of the issues are with the variations in the drivers).

Otherwise, your distribution's wireless configuration wizard should now see the card and allow you to set up a connection to a specific AP. I have not tried it, but I understand that aliases allow you to configure multiple AP connections to one wireless card.

Here are some references that may help