Hi, I am new to Linux / Debian and have recently installed Lenny. I am trying to get my PCI wireless adapter functioning properly within Debian. It is a Belkin Wireless G Desktop Card Ver 7000uk. I have identified that the card has a Realtek RTL8185L ver. 7200 chipset from http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/n ... _F5D7000UK (i.e. it is the Realtek variant)
Debian recognised the card during installation and automatically installed the rtl8180 driver. I am unsure whether the 8180 driver is supposed to support the 8185l chipset although I seem to remember reading it was supposed to support at least the 8185 chipset. However, this driver did not work and although wlan0 was showing up in Network Manager, the radio was not even working (i.e. it was not displaying any available wireless networks).
So I used Ndiswrapper to wrap the Windows version of the Belkin driver that was supplied on CD originally with the PCI card. I used the recommended version of the driver (blkwgdv7.sys/inf) from the Ndiswrapper PCI Device database (link above) and the latest version of Ndiswrapper. This all went OK (although I did have to blacklist the rtl8180 driver to get Debian to use the Ndiswrapper / Windows driver) and once I had used modprobe to insert Ndiswrapper into the kernel, the radio was working on the wireless card and I could see my wireless router in Network Manager.
I can just about connect to my router now and get an internet connection but the connection is very poor and lasts only for maybe 2 minutes at a time. If I reboot into Windows the connection is fine. So I was just wondering if anyone had any suggestions as to how I could improve this? I'm not really sure if it could be a problem with the wireless settings in Debian maybe?? But I'm unsure as to how I would go about changing anything.
Edit: Where I have mentioned Network Manager, I actually just mean the "Network" application / dialog under System, Administration in X Window / Gnome, I cannot actually install Network Manager as when I try using Aptitude it won't work, probably because I'm not online I guess. Likewise I cannot install many packages and am having quite a few problems, getting in a bit of a vicous circle at the moment!
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[Solved] Belkin Wireless G Desktop Card Problems
[Solved] Belkin Wireless G Desktop Card Problems
Last edited by leveller on 2010-02-25 11:34, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Belkin Wireless G Desktop Card Problems
I have now solved this problem. For anyone who runs into similar difficulties, the problem was that my wireless network has WPA enabled security protection. What I didn't realise was that I needed to install wpa_supplicant so that Debian could deal with my WPA password and access my wireless network. I was inputting the WPA password for my router into the correct box in Network Settings under wlan0. However as I now understand it, this dialog box is merely the graphical frontend for wpa_supplicant and will not work without it.
The reason I was getting a very slow and tempermental internet connection before was because Debian was automatically connecting to an unsecured wireless network in my area that had poor signal strength without me realising.
The reason I was getting a very slow and tempermental internet connection before was because Debian was automatically connecting to an unsecured wireless network in my area that had poor signal strength without me realising.