Edimax RT73 USB recognised but not working!

ludfic · #1 17th February 2009, 07:21 PM

Hi

I have just installed Fedora 10 on a Dell Inspiron 530. I was delighted to see on the very first boot into the system that my Edimax RT73 USB stick was recognised by the system as it was offering a selection of wireless networks to connect to. But oddly, my own network wasn't listed there. I created a new network and entered the network id manually. Once it was in the list, I checked the radio button and saw a message that I am connected to my network. But after a few seconds the network icon disappeared.

I rebooted the system and again went through the same process with the icon disappearing.

I have an Edimax wireless access point with DHCP enabled. The security is WPA2 Personal with AES.

Vista is also dual booting on the same machine and working fine.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks.

ludfic · #2 21st February 2009, 09:42 AM

Hi all

I didn't have any replies to my post. Is it because this question has been answered already? If so, could you please point me to some links?

Thanks.

SuperSkippy · #3 21st February 2009, 11:34 AM

No, it's cos no one knows the answer.

As root., try /sbin/iwlist wlan0 scan. Is your network in there?

Also, have you got your SSID set to broadcast on your router? If not, try it with it set to broadcast whilst you get it working.

In general, when solving problems, try and make it as simple as possible. So start by turning all encryption off on the router, seeing if you can get it to work, then try WEP, then try WPA. As I understand it WPA is a bit tricky on Fedora.

ludfic · #4 25th February 2009, 06:11 PM

Thanks for replying.

I tried the scan and couldn't see my network there. My SSID is set to broadcast on the router. I also tried to connect using no encryption and that didn't work either. I did get this error message from SELinux:

Summary:

SELinux is preventing consoletype (consoletype_t) "read" to
/var/lib/dhclient/dhclient-wlan0.leases (dhcpc_state_t).

SuperSkippy · #5 25th February 2009, 06:13 PM

Random stuff doesn't work for no apparent reason? Sounds like SELinux!

Try disabling it. Do this by editing /etc/sysconfig/selinux, and change the line that says SELINUX= to SELINUX=disabled.

SuperSkippy · #6 25th February 2009, 06:18 PM

Also. If you've got it set to broadcast on your router.... Can you see it by scanning on other computers (when you use Vista perhaps? I mean without manually typing the name in.)

Oooh! I've an idea. Some countries restrict what channels wifi can broadcast on. This is usually done by telling your card/router which country it's in. So for instance (I'm making the numbers up), channels 1-16 might exist, but channels 1 and 2 are illegal to use in Belgium, but OK in Uruguay, but Uruguay bans channel 16. What normally happens is you tell your computer "I am in Uruguay" and the computer will say "OK no channel 16 for you!"

Try changing what channel your router pumps out on to one in the middle, say 9 if that's free (you can see which ones are free by doing iwlist like in my earlier post).

ludfic · #7 1st March 2009, 10:50 AM

Thanks so much for your help. I disabled SELinux and changed the channel of my access point. I can connect to the network albeit with WEP only. My ESSID is now recognised, but if I change the encryption to WPA or WPA2, I don't get the option to select that from the connection pop-up GUI. WEP is good enough for now, but in future I would like to go back to WPA2 Personal.