Linux Mint Forums

I'm having problems with wifi in Mint 6. I've got an Edimax EW-7108PCg PCMCIA card (rt2500 based) in my Dell Inspiron 5100 Laptop. In Mint 5 it worked fine with ndiswrapper, connecting to my WEP network.

In Mint 6, with ndiswrapper, it appears to connect perfectly -- the lights on the card show a connection, the icon in the taskbar reports a connection. But it's not actually connected -- I can't even ping the gateway at 10.0.0.2. I just get a "Network unavailable" message.

I'm currently using the default linux driver -- rt2500pci -- but it's really awful. It loses the connection about every few minutes, and takes three or four attempts to reconnect each time. When it's up, it actually seems faster than it did in Mint 5, but it's so rarely up that this is hardly useful. My Edimax card has two lights on it -- a Tx/Rx light, and a Link light. Normally the first stays steady if the signal's good, and the second stays on and flickers with network activity. With the rt2500pci driver, only the Tx/RX light comes on, it flickers sometimes, but gives no indication of whether the network's connected or not. The icon on the taskbar shows a much higher signal than is present (I live in a big house with thick walls, so there are places where the signal from the router is quite low, but the icon cheerfully shows 87% when it used to be about 56%.)

I never had any wifi problems in Mint 5, so this is intensely frustrating, especially since wifi is my only way of connecting to the net. Any help very much appreciated!

PS the link has dropped about five times while I've been writing this!

In the beginning you say it does not work but then you say it works, but really bad.
I'd recommend ndiswrapper again - should be the same as in Elyssa

Husse wrote:In the beginning you say it does not work but then you say it works, but really bad.
I'd recommend ndiswrapper again - should be the same as in Elyssa

The native linux driver drops the connection every ten minutes or so, so can't really be considered as working. And, as I said, ndiswrapper doesn't work for me *at all* in Mint 6.

Ouch - I missed that.
What now?
I can't find anything useful, what a shame...
I have to come back to you, I'll take a note of this topic

It seems that if you know how to compile the driver you can get a better here
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Downloads
Note the tool at the bottom
This is a description on how to do that in the Ubuntu forums that should work in both Elyssa and Felicia
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4894088
You could also first try to add to /etc/rc.local rc.local should not really be used so this is a "dirty" workaround

Finally plucked up the courage to try these suggestions, but with no luck. The first one just stopped the wifi working altogether (maybe I did something wrong along the way, but I don't *think* so), and the second didn't have any effect so far as I could see. I'm puzzled as to why ndiswrapper should stop working as an alternative, since it works fine in Mint 5. OTOH, I tried out a whole bunch of recent distros -- Ubuntu, Mandriva, OpenSUSE, Mepis, and couldn't get the wifi to work in any of them. Since its been working perfectly with this wifi card in a number of distros in the last 3-4 years, I can only think that something's been done to Linux at a fairly high level which this particular card doesn't like. The only distro I found that did work is Xubuntu Intrepid, despite the fact that the main Ubuntu Intrepid didn't work. I think I'll just hang on to Mint 5 for the moment.

Hmm, well, I finally solved the problem, though in an unorthodox way. I dropped my laptop this morning and broke the offending rt2500 card! This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, however, since I've replaced it with a D-Link DWL-G630 (it even had a Linux logo on the box!) and my wifi is working in Mint 6 *much* faster than it ever did with my old card. Technically, it's the same speed, so I guess the driver must be better.

Too bad, I didn't notice any problem with my rt2500 based card, except for the "rate 54M" that needs to be set.
What kind of encryption did you use ?

GoustiFruit wrote:Too bad, I didn't notice any problem with my rt2500 based card, except for the "rate 54M" that needs to be set.
What kind of encryption did you use ?

WEP. It was a PCMCIA card, and the Linux driver was called rt2500pci, which makes me think it wasn't quite right, and probably explained why the lights on it never worked properly except when using the Windows driver. But why it didn't work with ndiswrapper in Mint 6, I've no idea. Still, I'm very happy with my new card!

Just a short remark
WEP is crap (anyone can crack it in around ten minutes) and therefore the support in Linux is less than for WPA - the devs don't bother

I know that. But I'm not in charge of my landlady's router, so I can't change it. Mind you, our house has such thick stone walls that anyone wanting to hack into the network would need to break into the house first!