Hi guys,

I've recently installed Mandriva 2006 on my laptop (HP nc6000). I'm new to Linux but am well digging it so far. The problem I've got is a wierd one in that I can't connect to my wireless network at home. I can 'see' the connection and get pretty good signal strength but when I click on connect, I get "Unable to contact daemon". I'm running a pre-shared key setup with 4 other machines in my house that all work fine but the laptop just won't play.

Strangely enough though, when I go to my office, I can connect to one of our secured wireless networks no problem. The laptop detects the network, I click on it, enter the pre-shared key and voila, I'm connected. None of this unable to connect nonsense. Nothing changes on the laptop configuration wise between work and home so I don't get it.

Any advice, hints, tips?

Cheers.

Hi,

I'm a debian user with the same laptop as you, so I'm not sure if this would help you.
Have you tried configuring /etc/network/interfaces and put in all the wireless networks for the same interface so you can switch between work and home?

Basically, what I have is the kernel autoloading the wireless connection to my home wireless network by default when booting up, then when I suspend to ram or disk before going to work, it saves the last connection made. When I go to work and resume from suspend, I open a terminal and do the ifdown/ifup eth*=eth*-work dance and it switches over without a problem.

I would love for it to be automatic, but I'm not complaining though. :-)

I have the same laptop - I switch hard drives when I want to use a different distro, but I mainly stick to Debian.

The best thing I ever did, as far as wireless goes, was to install NetworkManager. I don't know if it's available in the repositories for Mandriva, but it's available to compile and install on your own, I'm sure.

NetworkManager automatically finds available wifi access points and displays them to you from an icon on the taskbar. Click on the access point you want to use, enter the key (if required), and away you go. One thing though - you have to edit your /etc/network/interfaces file like so:

# The primary network interface
#allow-hotplug eth0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp

to allow NetworkManager to manage the access points. It really works great!

It said archive not supported. I am running ubuntu I have a hp pavillion xv5000 I get the same problem. I can hit the network at the cafe in a heartbeat, but at the studio, no luck. so how can I "support" this archive?