I need help connecting to internet

Question

First off, I'll introduce myself. My name is Dan, and I am a pc tech/repair guy during my free time. I am young, so I don't have a lot of knowledge yet, but I am learning. I currently have next to no knowledge of how to navigate any Linux distro.

My issue is in internet connections. I have connected my pi (type b with pimame/raspbian os) to my router via a normal cat5 ethernet cable, and expected the network lights to blink. The result was disappointing, the lights did not blink, neither did I have access to the web through midori. The router is configured to use DHCP (I cannot access that part of my router, however my dad can, and he is a CTO for a school district). I have looked all over the internet for why this would happen, and have found no documentation for what to do in this situation. I am not sure what to do, I really only want to install ndiswrapper, that way I can install win2k drivers for my USB Wi-Fi dongle (D-link DWA-130 version E1), that way I can have wireless connection. I have also tried connecting to my pc. I connected the two with a standard ethernet cable, and installed PuTTY in order to connect the two. I get an error that the connection timed out. I have also gone the route of modifying the cmdline.txt and adding my pc's ipv4 address (which is not static I believe). I have also gone into the terminal on my pi in order to set an ip address, but that doesn't seem to assist me at all in my connection with my pc, or router.

If there is any way to fix my ethernet port or board (if broken), or install ndiswrapper via and offline installer or download, I would be grateful. This "malfunction" is starting to get on my nerves. If you need any more information, I would be glad to provide it.

Thanks.

iagorubio · Accepted Answer

Hello dan.

If the lights are not turning on that's not a configuration issue, but a hardware issue most likely as the lights indicate activity that's at the hardware level - data link.

That shows a faulty cable or faulty network interface on any end. If there is no link between the hardware devices no configuration will ever fix it.

Try with another cable or plugin it on a working port in your router.

About the ndiswrapper, I fear it won't work in the Raspberry Pi.

ndiswrapper is a device driver wrapper to make windows device drivers to work on Linux. It does that interfacing the NDIS Windows API - Network Driver Interface Specification, with the Linux Kernel. The problem here is the device driver code it will interface - windows driver - is written for another architecture - x86 - so It can't really work in an ARM system as the Raspberry Pi.

For it to work it would have to translate x86 instructions to ARM ones, but such an interpreter would be too slow to work for a device driver.

It only works with x86 and x86-64. It can interface with other architectures as PowerPC but is pointless because there are no Windows drivers for the PowerPC.

My advice is to go for a dongle for your Raspberry instead of trying to savage an unsupported one.

There are lots of them quite cheap, and you can go for a good dongle with good support that can do more things for you in the long run: http://elinux.org/RPi_USB_Wi-Fi_Adapters

As example dongles with the Realtek RTL8188CUS chipset are know to work well in your Pi even as a wireless Access Point so you can get your Pi with you and make a private Wireless network for your friends to play games, share files or to learn a bit about network security checking out what goes through the Raspberry in a wifi session.

If you change the cable and the link works but you still have problems for connection I will be happy to help with that, just post it here.

Happy hacking.