I installed Fedora Core 3 on an old Dell Inspiron 7k. I have a Linksys WPC11 v.3 wireless card installed. Sometimes I get an error message when I try to activate the interface saying "Different MAC address than expected" and the interface fails to open. The solution I have found is to restart pcmcia once or twice, then it works. The weird thing is, if I boot the computer in a place with wireless service, it automatically brings up the interface, although I have told it not to activate on boot. Could this be some problem in the order it brings up the network or pcmcia stuff? Any ideas? Thanks!!

I seem to remember that in Red Hat, the network config tool put a line in the interface config script specifying a MAC address. Comment out that line and you should be OK.

It will be in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 (or whatever your wireless interface is labeled).

Unfortunately, that didn't work. I got an error saying that the device doesn't seem to be present when I commented out the MAC line. It seems like it isn't aware of the card until I restart the pcmcia stuff. Wierd...