gateway mx8438 laptop integrated wireless setup question

treborsitnay · 04-06-2009, 12:21 PM

I am working on a Gateway MX 8738 Laptop (1 GB RAM)running SLES 10.001. It has a Integrated Realtek 802.11b/g Wireless Networking NIC (Realtek 6.1281.130.2007). I can connect with the hardwired NIC to the local router, but not to the 802.11b/g Wi-Fi on the same Linksys router.

What do I need to do? I am a relative newbie to SuSE, some experience with Ubuntu, but nothing strong. But I can follow directions and have over 25 years in IT, networking and communications, so am not totally inept.

Any assistance or suggestions are greatly appreciated

Thanks.

Robert

alan_ri · 04-07-2009, 06:32 AM

Welcome!
It looks like you're missing a Realtek driver because you have an old distro with old kernel.Maybe you should go here and here to read a little about it or use NdisWrapper.Mr.Google pointed me to this page for a little help about it,but there are lots of pages here at LQ also,just search for them.
You could run commands like;

Code:

lspci -v
iwconfig
ifconfig -a

in the Konsole to look for more info about your hardware and network.

treborsitnay · 04-09-2009, 10:31 AM

Thanks Alan for the reply.

I just learned a little while ago that the latest Open SuSE release 11.0, Kernel 2.6.27, has native support for the Realtek NIC chipset built in. However, that will all have to wait for sometime for me to work on it, as I have just been handed an extended project in North Carolina, that I had to leave for yesterday, and will be working on for at least a month, before I return to the home office.

I will however, try both the ndiswrapper and the latest SuSE when I return.

Thanks again for the help and tips.

Robert

(this thread can be closed - I will try do so if there is time today, or do later this week)