RE: Wireless Setup Problem

["Stackpole, Chris" <CStackpole barbnet com>]

> From: Thomas H. George [mailto:lists tomgeorge info]
> Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 12:35 PM
> Subject: Wireless Setup Problem
> 
> I installed a Debian system including Gnome 2.22.3 on my OLPC (One
> Laptop per Child) laptop from a usb drive and tried to make a wireless
> connection to our LAN.
> 
> After numerous tries (details below) I succeeded yesterday afternoon.
> 
> Today nothing works.  When I put the cursor on the network icon the
> message "manual network configuration" appears and when I click on the
> icon the message "no network devices have been found" appears.  If I
> open a terminal and enter iwconfig everything is just I left it
> yesterday.
> 
> A part of the problem is that our LAN uses static ip addresses not
dhcp.
> Yesterday I tried iwconfig and ip commands without success. Finally,
in
> /usr/share/doc/wireless-tools/README.Debian I found I could edit
> /etc/network/interfaces and add to the iface eth1 inet static stanza
the
> lines
> 
> 	wireless-essid foo
> 	wireless-mode ad-hoc
> 
> Immediately after I did this putting the cursor on the network icon
> showed three signals - one for our lan and two for the neighbors.  The
> system connected to our lan and through the gateway to the internet.
> 
> As I said, today nothing works though iwconfig shows out essid and
mode
> ad-hoc and Link Quality=100/100 Signal Level=0 dBm Noise Lever= -96
dBm.
> 
> What could have gone wrong?

I am guessing that you are using network-manager. I usually like
network-manager, but the one consistent problem I have had with
network-manager has been setting manual IP addresses. You may want to
consider installing WICD instead. I, and many others, have had great
luck with WICD.

http://wicd.sourceforge.net/download.php
Hope this helps!

Have fun!
~Stack~