I'm trying to get a Linksys WPC54G 802.11G wireless card working on my Dell Inspiron 1000 under OpenSuSE 10.2. I actually had it working using ndiswrapper under 10.0, but I had to do a fresh install of 10.2 so nothing carried over. I've tried using the driver that comes with 10.2 and also tried using ndiswrapper with both the bcmwl5.inf and the lsbmnds.inf drivers. No matter what I do, I cannot get the card to show up under ifconfig (or, of course, to connect to the Net).

This is a dual-boot machine and the card works perfectly well under Windows. It also is detected by Yast's hardware inventory. Installing it under Yast produces no visible errors. I'm using WPA-PSK validation and I'm pretty sure I've specified all the parameters of that correctly.

Any advice on how to track this down and get the card working?

Have you tried using Lstinds.inf? That's the one I use on my version 2 card.

I don't know why, but the Internet connection suddenly started working after a reboot. The setup included both the Linux driver for the 80211G card and a second entry in the Yast cardlist for "Wireless Network Card" with ndiswrapper and lsbmnds.inf installed in ndiswrapper. All this is on a friend's laptop that is no longer here.

But I still have a problem. The laptop in question is a Dell Inspiron 1000 (I accidentally misreported the other laptop as also a 1000 when it's actually a 1200). The 1200 works fine now (or did when I last saw it). But the 1000 hangs during boot and also during shutdown unlessI pull the wireless card out of the machine. If I reinsert it after I've logged in, no problems until logout. It seems like a very odd interaction. I think it's hanging during startup on the NFS connection and on shutdown on the attempt to close down named, but I'm not sure.

I can operate by removing the card at the necessary times, but I shouldn't have to do that.

Does the laptop hang for a minute or two and then continue or until you force it to continue?

Try rearrange the order that the init scripts are run so that the card is started before any networking scripts are started and shutdown last after all network scripts have finished.

Check the log files and see if there are any entries related to network startup/shutdown.