RickSpace

Okay, so I thought everything was going great with Red Hat 9, and indeed, for what it did, it was great. But I wanted to use the ndiswrapper package in order to use my Linksys Wireless USB 11 stick. Well, as it turns out, RH9 was using the 2.4.somethinglessthanIneeded kernel. Basically, I was going to have to update the kernel; this is not something I like doing, but not something I’m entirely unfamiliar with. But basically, I didn’t want to nuke the whole install just because my NIC wasn’t working, but I wanted to get it working… so I updated to Fedora Core 3 which took just about as long as a from-scratch install. But anyway, once that was done, I now had a new enough kernel, my XWindows running in full screen, and it boots to prompt (runlevel 3) instead of booting graphically, so I’m happy… sorta.

So I get the Win32 drivers for my NIC, and the ndiswrapper, and after much toiling and trouble with it (mostly my own fault for not reading things completely) I get the NIC installed, using the ndiswrapper, and Linux sees it and there are no real problems… except for the prevaling problem that I STILL cannot get DHCP. So, this gets me thinking because now I’ve had like 4 linux installs with two different network cards not getting DHCP to work. So I check my Windows machines and find that if I reboot with DHCP enabled, they don’t get leases either. GRRRR! You are KIDDING me! So I unplug/restart my router and my dsl modem (just to be thorough) and sure enough when it comes back up, my Windows machine instantly grabs DHCP, I change the wireless NIC on my now FC3 box to use DHCP and oila, I have IP address and internet connectivity. I take the laptop upstairs trimphantly (the battery doesn’t work, so I shut it down, unplug it, take it upstairs, plug it in, boot it up, wlan0 comes up with an ip address, I ping google.com, of course it comes back just fine and I excitedly issue the ’startx’ command. XWindows comes up, gaim autoloads because I told it to, and I get my contact lists and such. Now, I try to open a web-browser to start … browsing the web, of course. Firefox takes forever to even open up (I mean, I get an entry down in the taskbar, but no visual in the screen area… finally it comes up, but can’t get to the webpage… I run a terminal, which sits in the taskbar forever and never actually shows up… Any program I try to run, nothing will open or execute correctly, my gAim shows me as online but I cannot ACTUALLY message anyone, even my wife sitting in the chair next to me… I try to log out of xWindows but it’s not letting me, so I CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE my way out, which shows all kinds of crashing errors, I get to the prompt, try to ping google.com again, and this time, it can’t get there… wtf happened? I tried this 3 times in a row before deciding not to give it any more thought and instead to just sulk about the house the rest of the night feeling defeated.

I WILL get this working, and I don’t want to re-install some other variant of Linux at this point because I think I’m very close… any thoughts on what would cause an ndiswrapper’d wireless NIC to work before entering X but slowly degrade to the point of no longer working?