Sunday, May 04, 2008

Notes on my D-Link DWL-G520+ with Ubuntu 8.04

Don't recall how I install the board, I think that I just plug it in and Ubuntu did it's magic (long gone the days of having to install modules, recompile kernels, etc).

So the board was recognized but when I tried to log into my wireless network my pc froze, halted, stop working, didn't answer, etc. . The process was quite simple, turn on the pc and on the nm-applet select the essid of my home network. Enter the key or passphrase and done.

The problem starts at this moment, the pc is complete frozen. No mouse, ctrl-alt-backspace, ast-f1/f9, ssh to it, nothing.. no response at all. Therefore the next step was to unplug it and start again but after the 3rd attempt it was obvious that there was a problem somewhere.

My guess is that the nm-applet is trying to execute itself without sudo therefore a pop up asking for the password should appear but that never happened and the pc goes into frozen mode waiting for somebody/something to enter the sudo password to continue. (at least that is my theory). To go around this what I did was to add the details manually on the configuration file. The steps are below:

The D-Link DWL-G520+ is recoganized as follows:
richard:/etc/network$ lspci
05:09.0 Network controller: Texas Instruments ACX 111 54Mbps Wireless Interface
40:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 01)
richard$

on /etc/network/interfaces you enter the following settings for your wlan0.

richard:/etc/network$ more interfaces
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless-key
wireless-essid
richard:/etc/network$

Finally you restart you network devices:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

and done.. that connects you to your home wireless network. (forget about the eht0, that is for something else).

If somebody reads this, follow it as last resource. Google quite a lot first and when you find the correct solution let me know.

good luck.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

8.04 needs the restricted modules for acx111, i installed it and it freez the system ( it takes a long time to find it out, i am first trying to fix my xserver :-)

I deinstalled the restricted modules and now my system is stable, now i try to use this:
http://acx100.sourceforge.net/wiki/Main_Page
and use this http://downloads.sourceforge.net/acx100/acx-mac80211-20080210.tar.bz2 because i need WPA

Iam thinking the driver in Hardy are buggy :-)

CU

Anonymous said...

I also think Hardy's driver is buggy. My system lose the connection to the router and freezes when i restart the network.

It is not due to the router, because restarting the router does not work and restarting Ubuntu WITHOUT restarting the oruter works.