by oj » Jan 11th, '15, 17:18
ftriscari,
Have you tried what I did, removing the connection then setting it up again with the tool in mcc?
If it doesn't find the device it's most likely that the transmitter is off. Too many laptops do not have a hardware switch to toggle the transmitter, they rely on a "software switch" meaning a proprietary (aka 'secret') windows kernel "switch." The trick for most Linux distros is to get the transmitter on so normal setup can ensue.
I've used a number of tricks. If the machine has dual boot, I've booted into windows first, which turned the xmitter on, the did a reboot into Linux. (that is not a complete shutdown/startup) This worked on about 90% of such machines. Some laptops shut the xmitter off when reading BIOS no matter what. If you have one of them you may never get wireless working. At least not with the distro you want to use. As an example, I had one laptop that fedora would start the transmitter but Mageia, PCLinuxOS and others I like to use did not. I just bit the bullet and used fedora on that one.
Any way you can think of to do the reboot trick would work, it doesn't have to be windows. Maybe you could boot a live cd/dvd of a distro that does handle the device, then restart back into Mageia. (hoping the transmitter stays on)
The only other advice is to poke around system setup (BIOS) and see if there's any mention of wifi, and make changes. (when testing BIOS changes only change one thing at a time, and if it doesn't help, set it back to where it was) I had one system that had a wifi-related option like "allow soft switch." It seemed counter intuitive, but turning that off actually resulted in the transmitter being on full time. Alas, I only saw that work on that one computer.
Nevertheless, it can't hurt to change some settings.
And of course I must mention that if you do have a hardware switch, make sure it's on, or try turning it off and on to see if the system awakes to the arrival of 'new hardware.'