Wireless Card on Xubuntu (D-Link WNA-2330)

to check, you can try this

shut down the system
remove the wireless card
start the system
open a terminal and type tail -f /var/log/syslog
plug the wireless card in
if the system is seeing the card at all, you will see the kernel messages on the terminal
you can scroll back and see if a driver is being installed, a device assigned, any errors encountered, etc.

If you don't see anything, then it does sound like something with your cardbus...you might be able to look through dmesg to see what is causing it to have problems.

hope this helps.

Okay so I do what you told me and as soon as I plug the card back in I get

"[ 159.684000] cs: pcmcia_socket0: cardbus cards are not supported"

what does this mean?

looking around at various documents, it appears that it could mean a number of things. Out of curiosity, do you have a NetGear card?

it appears that there are two potential fixes you could try.

1. Check your bios settings for PC Card. When you first boot your machine, you should get a screen saying press FX to enter the BIOS. On my system it is F12, many systems use F1 or F8. Once in the BIOS settings, look for PC Card settings. If it says Auto-Selected, try changing it to Card Bus/16 Bit (or something similar)

2. If the BIOS settings don't exist or don't work, then you can try adding noapci to your kernel boot line in Grub. While backing up menu.lst, the system will ask you for your password, type it in and press enter even though you want see anything on the screen when you type it, it is ok.

cd /boot/grub
sudo cp menu.lst menu.lst.bak
gksudo gedit menu.lst

Once in gedit, look towards the bottom of the file, and you will see the various kernels that you can boot with. On the stanza you normally use (probably the top one), find the line that starts with the word 'kernel', and at the end of that line (which may wrap to the next one) add a space and the word 'noapci' with out the quotes. Save the file, and reboot.

If adding the noapci option to grub works, you will likely want to make one other change to your menu.lst file so that the option doesn't disappear on the next kernel refresh.

cd /boot/grub
gksudo gedit menu.lst

Once in gedit, look for a line that starts with # kopt=
At the end of this line, add a space and noapci
Save the file. No reboot necessary this time.

If adding noapci to grub does not work, then you probably want to remove it from menu.lst

Hope this helps.

Okay, well I did some more searching on Google and I came across a post on a forum - someone had a little bit older laptop then mine they said they tried putting these arguments into the Grub.

acpi=on acpi=force lapic pci=usepirqmask pci=biosirq

And my wireless card has power now and the laptop still boots....But I'm not satisfied -- I'm one that wants to know what is going on..

so what do all those mean??

acpi is the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface
on: means you want to enable acpi
force: Force ACPI to be enabled. Can be used to override the kernel configuration option that disabled it.

apci is the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller
lacpi: Enable the local APIC. Cause the kernel to enable the local APIC even if the BIOS had disabled it.

pci is the Peripheral Component Interconnect
psi=usepirqmask: Honor the possible IRQ mask stored in the BIOS $PIR table. This is needed on some systems with broken BIOSes, notably some HP Pavilion N5400 and Omnibook XE3 notebooks. This will have no effect if ACPI IRQ routing is enabled.
pci=biosirq: Use PCI BIOS calls to get the interrupt routing table. These calls are known to be buggy on several machines and hang these machine when used, but on other machines they are the only way to get the interrupt routing table. Try this option if the kernel is unable to allocate IRQs or discover secondary PCI buses on your motherboard.

hope this helps