mint 11 wireless adapter driver

POP

loaded mint 11 from cd, but can't make wireless connection.

Ian_Martin

Hi,
There's a whole lot of possibilities here. These are some of the common problems (and I'm assuming you have a wired interface):

First up, confirm you have some hardware and the system is aware of it. In a terminal,

lshw -C network

will give you a list of what network drivers are running, and whether they're connecting. You may need to install the lshw command with

sudo apt-get install lshw

You're looking for something that starts with "description: Wireless interface".
The command

rfkill list

(you may need to install it with

sudo apt-get install rfkill

) will show you if you've got a hardware or software switch turned off. Sometimes you can flick a switch or use rfkill to turn it on. If you've turned the card off in Windows, however, that can be a show stopper; for some laptops there's no way of turning it on in Linux.

If the wireless card is visible to the system, then you'll need to look at why it's not connecting. This can be for a variety of reasons. Have a look at the output of the lshw command again, and see if there's anything obvious.

If the card is turned on, then it needs a network to talk to. The network settings icon down on your system tray is one way to access network settings; otherwise go through the System settings menu. You'll need the SSID ("name" of the network), and any security settings. If it's an unsecured network and you own the router, I'd strongly suggest you change that before you set it up.

Good luck!

rechil_colin

Most wireless adapters are not designed for use in Linux and depend on non-free proprietary drivers and firmware which inevitably leads to problems. There has been a significant effort by the Linux community and some manufacturers to improve this situation and most recently released Linux distributions will support a significant number of wireless cards. Follow the following steps may help u to overcome this issue.....
Plug the router into internet socket if u want to share internet. Next plug router into PC with an Ethernet cable. Go to browser and type in the address like 192.168.0.1 (in most cases, else u have to type whatever u got). Type username / pass from router. Now enable wireless and set encryption mode either(WEP /WPA) and type a memorable passkey.
Now it is time to detect the wireless......
The wireless adapter should be detected automatically by the dist(Mint) & should be available in dist's network config tools !
If it is not detected then do the steps:
Type iwconfig into the terminal to see what wireless network interfaces have been detected. Next type sudo lshw (or lspci or lsusb) to list hardware and get details on the chipset that the card uses. As u r using Linux Mint, in this case u have to use MintWifi. U may need to use ndiswrapper and Windows driver, look up the ndiswrapper documentation for further helps.
Here u can connect to use NetworkManager there should be an icon near the clock which u can click on and choose encryption either(WEP /WPA) & type passkey.