I give up, how to get wireless working in Mandrake?
 

I have tried everything I can think of and find to get my wireless connection working with an Orinoco gold card and Mandrake 9.1.

The card is on, and the driver recognizes it, and it sees my router and network, even shows an IP address in the Mandrake configuration, but no connections can be made.
It isn't a DNS problem because I cannot even connect to the router's IP like I normally can from a browser. I am not using encryption either.

I thought maybe it was my router's MAC address control, that somehow Linux was sending a different MAC address than Windows, but when I disabled MAC address control (from Windows) and rebooted the router and my machine, still the same problem.

I tried editing /et/init.d/pcmcia to make it load before the network drivers.

I edited the eth0 and eth1 files under /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ so that eth0 is not loaded on bootup, only eth1.

I commented out the default WEP password in /etc/pcmcia/wireless-opts

Is there another obscure config file I am missing? It seems like everything is working, it's just that the computer is not using eth1 for connections or something.

Do Suse or Knoppix or Redhat have the same problem recognizing wireless internet connections?

I've never used a wireless connection, but I had assumed that it would be as simple as configuring the interface.

If you've got a burner download knoppix and see how it handles wireless. If it works you can dig around in it's entrails to find out why.

Not only does the wireless work, but my Sony Vaio's trackpad is recognized as well in Knoppix (Mandrake only recognizes my mouse).

Knoppix sets the wireless connection as eth0 instead of eth1. Mandrake uses eth0 for the wired and eth1 for the wireless.

I typed "iwconfig" and /sbin/ifconfig in Knoppix and it showed the same results as in Mandrake. Both do see my wireless network. Connections do not work though in Mandrake.

Anyone wouldn't happen to know how I can install a driver for my touchpad too?

For your touchpad you need to use the internal auxilary PS/2 device (/dev/psaux)

Mandrake's default is probably to use /dev/input/mice. Since you're using a VAIO I know that it's a USB mouse.

The only way to be able to switch back and forth is to enable both the psaux and usb mice. It may seem tricky, but really it's just 2 properly configured mouse sections with different names.

As for the wireless thing, like I said I've never used it. My initial guess would be that you're missing a module. Boot from knoppix and run lsmod to see what modules it has loaded. Anything that looks like it might be a wireless driver, load it into mandrake and see what you get.
You can also check Knoppix's list of packages by typing dpkg -l ("dpkg -l | less" works well) in the konsole. It uses debian so package names may be a little different, but if there are any wireless specific packages find a mdk equivalent.

It was the firewall. Sorry to waste your time, but I appreciate your help.
I had to turn off the firewall and the wireless connections worked.
That didn't come to mind since everything worked fine for wired connections. I still haven't figured out which ports the router is using, I tried only allowing 53,101,and 42 but outgoing connections still didn't work.

And my mouse and trackpad are both working now.
For anyone else with a laptop, here is what I did on my Sony Vaio:

I downloaded and ran the synaptics rpm from here:
http://www.compass.com/synaptics/

It should add a startup script at /etc/init.d/touchpad that turns off tap clicking too (where it treats a tap on the trackpad itself as a mouseclick).

Secondly, I edited /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
(you need to have root privileges)

Mouse1 refers to my trackpad and Mouse0 is my USB mouse.

I added this line under the section ServerLayout:
InputDevice "Mouse0" "SendCoreEvents"

and here are my two configurations

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
##Driver "synaptics" (doesn't work)
Option "Protocol" "PS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Name" "AutoDetect"
Option "Vendor" "AutoDetect"
EndSection