[vox-tech] Wired & Wireless connection problems - Jaunty KDE4.3

[Eric Lin]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 12:13:52PM -0800, Thomas Johnston wrote:
> The two main networking problems are:
> (1) i can't get a wired network connection established.  I am on the
> UC Davis campus in my office.  I click the button to connect and it
> just hangs on "obtaining IP address".  Under the Wicd preferences tab,
> I have the DHCP client, Wired Link Detection, and Route Table Flushing
> all set to "automatic".  Other people in my lab running, windows, mac
> and other linux distros seem to have no wired connection troubles.

At the risk of sounding naive, it sounds like there's a dhcp issue. If
you're using dhcpcd, try using dhclient and vice versa. Pump might work
too, but I haven't seen pump for a while.

> 
> (2) my ability to connect to wireless networks is also limited. I can
> connect to SOME unencrypted wireless networks, e.g., I can connect to
> moobilenet.  However, my labmate has a open wireless network setup
> (with our lab printer on it) which I cannot connect to.  No
> encryption, no MAC address filtering, just an open 802.11g access
> point.    I generally cannot connect to encrypted networks.  However,
> I did finally managed to get connected to my wireless DSL router at
> home.

I have the same computer you do with the same configuration (I think.
I'd have to look at the output more carefully, but it looks like we have
the same wireless cards), and I use ndiswrapper for my wireless card
with one of the drivers from Dell's website (R174291.exe). If you want
the driver for ndiswrapper, you can also get the .tar.gz from my site
that has only the files you need (1). Not being able to connect to
unencrypted wireless networks might be due to driver issues. You didn't
say if this was an issue before the KDE upgrade, though, so I'm not sure
of that.

(1): http://ericflin.com/1395driver.tar.gz 

-Eric