Linux Mint Forums

by **sritzau** on Sat Jan 21, 2012 10:26 am

I have a (hopelessly) old computer that I run Mint 9 on (to be precise Kernel 2.6.32-21-generic i686 (32 bit) Distro Linux Mint 9 Isadora - Xfce). It was the kid's computer, but they don't have the patience for it anymore. I would like to move it to my basement to move around on a cart and serve as a reference when I am working on things, so it would be very handy to be able to get on my wireless network rather than having to put a couple of drops down there.

I also have an Airlink101 AWL5077 USB wireless adapter.

I have tried using the NDISwrapper/Windows wireless driver solution and what happens is this; When I first install it everything seems to work fine. Then, some time later, it drops out, and after that it repeatedly fails to connect.

I found these instructions;
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1555203.html
for getting a driver from Realtek who apparently makes the chipset on the adapter, but it would seem I am not sufficiently proficient to follow the instructions as posted. Also, I noted that those instructions are for a later version of Mint (actually Ubuntu), so I am not really sure that I will be successful in the end.

I would appreciate any guidance people could provide on this. It is not a very important project, but I would love to get it working. I realize that I may be on the edge of "doability", but I've been able to make this machine do everything else I want, which to me is exceptional considering its age >10 years and very limited memory (256 MB). There always seems to be a way.

Below is the text generated by running the mintWifi.py command

Thanks in advance,

Steve

Code: Select all: net8192su : driver installed device (0BDA:8171) present wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power:20 dBm Sensitivity=0/3 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0 Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0 eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 34:08:04:2d:c3:be inet addr:192.168.1.104 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::3608:4ff:fe2d:c3be/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:20056 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:11122 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:12781261 (12.7 MB) TX bytes:1639900 (1.6 MB) Interrupt:11 Base address:0xec00 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:660 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:660 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:42208 (42.2 KB) TX bytes:42208 (42.2 KB) wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:21:2f:2f:e8:b8 UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) Server: 156.154.119.11 Address: 156.154.119.11#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: google.com Address: 74.125.113.106 Name: google.com Address: 74.125.113.147 Name: google.com Address: 74.125.113.99 Name: google.com Address: 74.125.113.104 Name: google.com Address: 74.125.113.103 Name: google.com Address: 74.125.113.105 ------------------------- * I. scanning WIFI PCI devices... ------------------------- * II. querying ndiswrapper... ------------------------- * III. querying iwconfig... ------------------------- * IV. querying ifconfig... ------------------------- * V. querying DHCP... ------------------------- * VI. querying nslookup google.com...

by **sritzau** on Sun Jan 22, 2012 7:59 pm

I am not sure that this is useful information or not, but on a lark I threw in a live CD of Puppy Linux (i think it is 5.2.

and tried to get the USB wireless card working on that. I used NDISWrapper and, after a bunch of time noodling around with the network settings (not the card settings, but the network settings), everything has worked pretty well. I've had one drop-out over a couple of days, but otherwise it works OK.

To get things to work I had to adjust one of the WPA Algorithm settings on the router from AES to TKIP. I thought this might be my problem with Mint all along, so I tried going back to Mint

One of the thing I noticed when I returned to Mint was that the network connection couldn't find the MAC address of the router. If I fed it the MAC address manually and it worked (for a while) and then it dropped out After a while, I just could not reconnect. It would essentially keep asking me for a password for the network, which is the typical failure mode. I switched back to Puppy and all went well. That's what I am using right now. (I didn't install it - just the live CD)

Steve

Linux Mint Forums

USB Airlink101 AWL5077 on Mint Isadora XFCE

USB Airlink101 AWL5077 on Mint Isadora XFCE

Re: USB Airlink101 AWL5077 on Mint Isadora XFCE

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