Configuring Dell 1390 Wireless Card with FC6

[spiritofnow]

Hello all,

I'm a new member here, and just installed Fedora Core 6 on my Dell Latitude D820 laptop (am dual-booting with Windows XP Pro). Everything's fine; Fedora's installed and running perfectly, except that I'm unable to connect to a wireless network (unsecured home network; there's no key or anything required). I've compiled and installed ndiswrapper; it's running perfectly fine; I got the required Dell drivers and installed them with ndiswrapper; running the ndiswrapper -l command shows that the driver is installed and the hardware is detected:

bcmwl5 driver installed, hardware (14E4:4324) present

When I run the scan using iwlist wlan0 scan, the network I want to connect to (called "3Com") is even detected properly. I then issue the command:

iwconfig wlan0 essid 3Com

to tell Fedora to connect to the 3Com network. There's no error message output. Finally, I type:

/sbin/ifconfig wlan0 up
or
/sbin/dhclient wlan0

to get the connection up and running. And . . . nothing! No error messages, but nothing connects either. Bringing up Firefox shows that it's not being able to connect to the Internet.

What am I doing wrong? I have a feeling it's something really obvious and silly, because everything else has gone perfectly fine up until now. Is it something to do with the firewall? Do I have to tell it that wlan0 is an external interface? If so, how do I do this?

Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks very much!

[spiritofnow]

I've put the alias wlan0 ndiswrapper line in modprobe.conf. Now the system-config-network gui shows ndiswrapper on the hardware tab. I also installed NetworkManager and have the icon automatically loading at startup in the system tray. All wireless networks in the vicinity are being detected. But Fedora is not being able to connect to a wireless network named 3Com that I do manage to connect to from my Windows XP machines.

Here's the info I get from ifconfig and iwconfig. Not particularly helpful, though.

[root@localhost ~]# ifconfig wlan0
wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:16F:1C:E7:23
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)
Interrupt:177 Memory:dcffc000-dd000000

[root@localhost ~]# iwconfig wlan0
wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power:32 dBm
RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
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

Any ideas what might be wrong?

[spiritofnow]

Okay, here is the thing. When I use iwlist wlan0 scan to get the list of available wireless networks, my network is listed as having low signal quality -- 12/100. I think this is why Fedora can't connect to it.

However, I'm puzzled. My Windows XP machines connect to it at 11.0 Mbps speeds all the time. So I'm really not sure what the problem is.

Well, in any event, if someone has some advice to offer, please let me know!