Dell D610 laptop, wireless almost connects

[wedgetail]

I am working on a Dell D610 laptop with a BC4311 network card? I have read a big thread about the interesting aspects of the Broadcom problems.  I have found in Synaptic that B43 is loaded. Also a few other topics foun in Forum.  I not really getting a feel for wireless yet.

I am very new to wireless and am experimenting to make the connection with only the MAC addresses, no broadcasting from the AP (access point) as I have an experimental AP running for Windows wireless. Presently running this way works fine on windows pcs.

From Dell:

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[root@localhost katie]# iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:off/any  Nickname:"localhost.localdomain"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated   <--- frequency = channel 5 as on AP
          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

[root@localhost katie]#

Configured  via PCC, but the connection if it is made reverts to DOWN

I do run with the LAN cable connected and to test I just turn off 'eth0'  and try to turn on 'wlan0'

I have entered the MAC address of the Broadcom

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wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:14:A5:4A:A3:4A  <---  MAC inserted in allowed list of AP
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING 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:17 Memory:dfbfe000-dfc00000

[root@localhost katie]#


My brain is overloaded, I seem to remember there are some konsole commands that could be handy, but at the moment I am blank.

Trying to turn on via the tray icon seems to be ok for a few seconds then drops out.?    

[wedgetail]

This is a long story but I might just skip most of it. I did a lot of searching and slowly worked out my own understanding of wifi, keeping in mind that I did have a BroadCom 4311 chip/card in this Dell D610.

My understanding is that the necessary files are now part of pclos and one way or another it should be possible to connect. What really through me was that PCC did not seem to recognise the card initially but at some stage it did start recognising.

Finally as first post says it almost gets there.  When I was looking in another thread my eye caught the command

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[root@localhost ~]#  service -f network
The original poster had run this as user, and I was reasonably sure that this needed to be run as root, so I tried and first did not notice that my wlan0 was brought up and held.  So I don't quite know what was causing the problem.

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,80202.0.html

This was great presentation of a problem I will copy my same detailsfrom my system into this topic,  as a record for my own use.