It is important for me to get the Wireless card working and it will allow me to move the case out of sight next to the TV. With ssh already installed, I will then be able to continue my installation from my laptop and Priyanka will not get annoyed with me having computer parts and cables all over the place.
The challenge with my wireless card is that it is a no-name no-brand card I got off ebay about 2 years ago. It never worked properly in my sisters computer, but I think that was because of the wireless router being faulty. My laptop's built in wireless card also never worked properly with that router.
Again, the WiFiHowTo entry in the Ubuntu wiki provided step-by-step instructions on how to set this up. The basic steps are as follows:
1) Verify that wireless-tools are installed. This is installed by default in Gutsy, so I didn't need to install it myself. If installation is required, typing "sudo apt-get install wireless-tools" will download and install it for you. This is assuming you have a network connection.
2) Running "lspci" gives you a full list of all your components. One of the lines says Network Controller and specifies what chipset my card is. Thankfully, it was a RaLink RT2500 based chipset. The drivers for these cards are part of the default install.
3) Type "iwconfig". This will show an output mentioning no wireless extensions on lo, eth0 and wmaster0. There will also be an entry called wlan0 which says IEEE 802.11g and a blank ESSID along with a number of other stats. This confirms that the card driver is installed and being correctly detected by the OS. This also says that wlan0 is the linux name for your wireless device.
4) Checking /etc/network/interfaces showed that wlan0 is not set up. I added the following lines into it using sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless-essid MITTAL
wireless-key FEFEFEFEFE
wireless-channel 11
wireless-mode managed
The card is then started up by typing sudo ifup wlan0. The result is that the card is unable to get a DHCPOFFER. No matter what I try, it is unable to communicate with the router. I have turned WEP off as well as tries assigning a static IP. No luck in getting them to talk. My AP logs have no mention of any requests coming from the box. Reading the threads, this looks very common, but have not found any good solutions yet.
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