Got wireless working finally

Posted by markjr, Apr 5 2006, 09:51 PM in Using Xandros

It took me awhile to get my laptop working on the wireless interface. It took a bit of fiddling.

For starters, I needed to activate the ath0 (wireless) interface from the Control Center -> Network -> Network Connection -> Interfaces

The problem I kept running into was that if I booted the laptop with the ethernet plugged in, and then unplugged the cable, my wireless would work. But if I booted without the cable, my wireless would come up without a default gateway setup. It would connect to my DHCP server (a linksys wireless router) and be able to ping the gateway, but it couldn't find its way out to the internet.

To make matters worse, whenever I went into the interfaces GUI in the control center and ticked the "Set as default gateway for the system" checkbox, my laptop (an Acer Aspire 3620), would totally seize up forcing a hard boot.

In the end, the fix was trivial, just opening a shell and running:

Which I could add to the startup scripts to automate.