MEPIS Community Forum

Hello again. I've been tied up on other stuff for a few days. Have followed the above and can report:

Peter@mepismobile:~$ uname -mrsn
Linux mepismobile 2.6.39-2.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64 x86_64

Hardware scan

01:00.0 Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller [10ec:8136] (rev 05)
02:00.0 Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8188CE 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter [10ec:8176] (rev 01)

Linux Drivers

rtl8192ce 67154 0
rtlwifi 85075 1 rtl8192ce
r8169 41137 0
mii 5134 1 r8169

Windows Drivers

Nil

Things have changed since I started!

I still can't get the wireless to start. Mepis network assistant shows:

Green icon eth0
Red icon wlan0

There must be a next step I'm missing.

Any thoughts.

Install the realtek-firmware package (.deb) using synaptic (see Stevo's earlier post in this thread).
That might do the trick [after a reboot].

The squeeze-backports deb of the firmware, of course. But now there's a wlan0, so that may be done already.

Maybe a scan for networks would show something? Try

su -c 'iwlist scan'

in the terminal and see if you see any networks and if they have signal strenths greater than zero. Sometime the Mepis network assistant just gets stuck and blocks network-manager from doing anything, at least that's what happens on my laptop. I end up removing both and use wicd for connections.

Hi Stevo. Thanks for your continued interest



Looks like no network is being detected. Before I started this exercise I started the computer with (ugh) windows and it detected both my wireless and a couple of others in the neighbourhood, so I have no doubt there is a signal to detect.

I must say your input has been generous, but this is all so foreign to me I wouldn't know what was amiss, even if I saw it.

My frustration level is coming close to the point where I will be looking at other distros to see if there is something that will work without all this palaver. I don't want to do this, but how much frustration can one take?

check network assistant and be sure the ndiswrapper drivers are disabled on the first page of network assistant then on the wireless section do the scan for networks and be sure to type in your passphrase if you have security enabled. If the ndiswrapper drivers are enabled the realteck drivers will conflict with them and not load. Jerry

I have seen that "network is down" response when mnetwork is locking up the system.

One way to deal with it is to uninstall mnetwork in Synaptic, which should clear the block. It seems a bit drastic, but that's what I have had to do. This will also remove all the ndiswrapper drivers, which will clear that possible issue. A reboot and retry of

su -c 'iwlist scan'

should let us know if there is still a problem.

Wireless Woes - Solved.

Thank you all for the time you have spent in helping me to get wireless access.

Unfortunately, it's all been in vain. I crossed my pain threshold (far later than most users, I feel, because I like Mepis).

The solution:

Downloaded and installed Mint 12 64 bit with KDE.

I had a wireless connection within a couple of minutes of starting the live disk. Installation is longer than Mepis, but hey, it works. The extra time appears to be setup also downloading all the updates (as against Mepis doing this later) and language packs. Wireless worked for this setup but required set up again once the installation was complete.

I really wanted to stay with Mepis on the laptop, but it just got too hard.

I hope I can come back to Mepis when this "just works". It's still on my desktop.