Wireless Card Qualms. Oy gevalt.
 

I'm trying to set up a D-Link DWL-250 (which is on the prism2 chipset). YAST2, in Suse8.2, has detected the card as a D-Link Ethernet Wireless Controller. I can't seem to get the settings right, though. Each time I exit Yast, it still won't connect to the net. I have a linksys router with the default - just for this setup, I don't really have a deathwish - ssid of linksys and no wep. The settings that Yast has are essid, nwid, enc, and nickname. What do I do? I tried do this from the console with the standard modprobe orinoco, ifconfig eth1 up, iwconfig eth1 essid "linksys", dhcpcd eth1. The problem I get with that is a no device found from both ifconfig and iwconfig. I checked /dev and there isn't an eth1 device, or an eth-anything for that matter (not even my onboard eth0). Is YAST insane and not really creating network devices when I tell it too. If so, how would I go about first creating and then setting up a wireless ethernet device on my own. Thanks.

do an lsmod and see if the modules for your card are listed there, check your /var/log/messages(or whatever SuSE uses for that) with today's date and see if a device got registered for your device, registering a device for your card is the responsibility of the kernel module, not yast. If no device got registered in your log, then perhaps something will be listed that will lead you in the right direction. dmesg may also help.

OK, I switched back to Redhat because there were too many things I wasn't liking about SuSE - GNOME support is utter crap. Do I need to have the kernel module loaded before Redhat does the "Checking for New Hardware" at boot. How would I do that? Right now, it's as if the card doesn't exist at all. It hasn't be recognized in any way whatsoever. Could this be a BIOS problem maybe? I've turned off "Plug and Play OS" in the BIOS. And I've tried different PCI slots, too. What could be going wrong? What can I do to get my PC online?

No matter what anyone tells you, getting wireless to work with linux is still a PITA. However, you can lessen the pain considerably. First, if you want to use the orinoco drivers you can try this as root:

modprobe hermes
modprobe orinoco
modprobe orinoco_pci

Then do a

lsmod

to make sure they were loaded.

Then try

ifconfig eth0 up

Then try (with the GUI running)

redhat-config-network

to see if you can configure this guy.

Do a search on linuxquestions for the MA311 card. I give pretty complete directions for using the wlan-ng RPM set, which is much better than the orinoco stull (IMHO, of course).

Holler back if you need more help.

Cheers--
Charles

OK, I've read over a lot of stuff about the MA311. The main problem I'm having, I think, is that my card is not being assigned a device. I have an on-board ethernet controller that is always assigned eth0. I would expect my new WNIC to be assigned eth1 in that case, but that isn't happening. So, I load the modules, do an lsmod and see that they are in fact loaded (I've only been doing "/sbin/modprobe orinoco" thus far, I'll try with the other commands when I get home), but then when I try /sbin/ifconfig eth1 up or anything with iwconfig I get a device not found returned to me. What would cause this? It seems so odd to me. Both in SuSE and Redhat, the card is not assigned an eth device name. Does a device only get the "eth" alias after all of its drivers have been loaded maybe?

I assume so. I have a machine with 2 cards, one wi-fi (the Netgear MA311), and the other on-board. To get things to happen at boot, you will need to add a line to your modules.conf file , something like

alias eth1 orinoco_pci

If you read your modules.conf file (it is short) for your eth0 interface, you make the eth1 interface entry similar.

You will also need a file in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts named

ifcfg-eth1

You will have one called ifcfg-eth0 and you can use it as the pattern. I do not know if you can use DHCP to get IP addresses, since I don't use DHCP.

You may also need to have a set of files in /etc/rc.* so that the eth1 interface comes up in the various run levels.

If you have the very *latest* version of the Redhat 9 kernel *and* the latest errata for the networking packages, you should be able to see and manipulate the eth1 interface with redhat-config-network.

Do this by hand is a good learning experience, but as I said, it is a pain. The RPM set for wlan-ng turns out to be much cleaner. If you are using DHCP, you may not even have any files to edit (at most there are two).

But, the route you are going is fine. Don't let me dissuade you from learning the orinoco way. I did it that way at first, too.

Cheers--
Charles

Alright, thanks a lot for your time. I'll try this all when I get back to my PC later this afternoon and let you know if I run into other problems. Thanks for you help so far. This has been a very frustrating problem, since it makes maintaining my websites a lot more difficult. :P

Glad to help. It will be sometime after 8:00 pm Central Time (USA) before I will get back, so don't worry if I don't reply right away. Then again, if you tinker around, you are more than likely to get things going on your own. Most of the problems I had were getting the eth1 interface to come up at boot in the various run levels. I literally spent days getting that to work right. I am a pretty slow learner, and since you only do this once or twice, it doesn't "stick." Hence, I really recommend that you write down *exactly* what you do so you can do it again!

Cheers--
Charles

OK, when I try /sbin/modprobe orinoco_pci I get the following output:

/lib/modules/2.4.20-2.48/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/orinoco_pci.o: init_module: No Such Device
HINT: insmod errors can be caused by incorrect module parameters, including invalid IO or IRQ parameters.

What does this mean? My card still doesn't show up in lspci. I had a sound blaster card in a pci slot that was recognized and configured at install. Now, I've even removed that, and the wireless card is the only one in a pci slot, so there shouldn't be IRQ conflicts.

What happened when you did

modprobe hermes
modprobe orinoco

??

Cheers--
Charles

Those commands worked perfectly. The top two lines of /sbin/lsmod are now:

orinoco 35704 0
hermes 8100 0 [orinoco]

Does anybody have any ideas? I never thought installing a simple wireless adapter could be so difficult. This is so frustrating.

Hey, is the password on your router set to the default too?, hehe, just kidding ;)

Believe it, I've installed 5 different wireless adapters on mandrake, redhat and slackware, it's not "simple".

Funny, but I can get those two modules to load also, (hermes and orinoco), and the wireless card currently in my machine is definitely not a prism-anything, it's an ti acx100, so having those modules load does not necessarily give one hope.

Do a /sbin/cardctl ident and post the output if possible, also do an /sbin/cardctl status and post as well. the error message you received when attempting orinoco_pci is telling: "no such device" means just that. So we know at this point that you don't have a cardbus or pci card with that chipset, we need to determine what it is you *do* have.

EDIT: oops, skip cardctl if you're using a pci card, which would of course, be my luck.

Yeah, it's a pci card, is there anything else I should try?

Did you say you've already done an "lspci -vv" and it didn't show your card? if not, please do.