Hello everybody
Finally got Lucent Orinoco Gold Card to work on Sony VAIO PCGRT816S Laptop -- Now that's everything including X and DVD playing -- So Bye Bye 'DOZE.

I'm running SUSE 9.0

First Ensure you set your normal LAN card (eth0 or whatever) to start MANUAL -- don't auto start it at boot as Linux gets confused
Here's the relevant bit out of /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0

BOOTPROTO='static'
BROADCAST='192.168.7.255'
IPADDR='192.168.7.3'
MTU=''
NETMASK='255.255.255.0'
NETWORK='192.168.7.0'
REMOTE_IPADDR=''
STARTMODE='manual' <======================
UNIQUE='8otl.ahQyBPJk0AA'

Ensure that your Orinoco card has been recognized -- answer yes to the hardware update. You'll get a network configuration -- choose wireless and select PCMCIA Prism and ORINOC etc cards -- doesn't matter as after you've done this you are going to edit the file anyway
so finish and now edit the file --in my case it's called ifcfg-wlan0

ensure the startmode is set to HOTPLUG -- this prevents the network from attempting to start before PCMCIA services have started.


BOOTPROTO='static'
BROADCAST='192.168.7.255'
IPADDR='192.168.7.4'
MTU=''
NETMASK='255.255.255.0'
NETWORK='192.168.7.0'
REMOTE_IPADDR=''
STARTMODE='hotplug' <======================
UNIQUE=''
WIRELESS_ESSID='belkin54g'
WIRELESS_KEY=''
WIRELESS_MODE='Ad-hoc'
WIRELESS_NICK=''
WIRELESS_NWID=''


Note -- I'm not adding any firewall info or other stuff here -- just basic minimum to start you off.

The ESSID should be your wireless access point. I should add encryption and keys once you've got the basic thing working first -- I've found out the hard way it takes much longer to try everything at once anyway. I'm also not using DHCP so with fixed IP addresses it's easy to check via ping if your network is reachable.

Now re-boot with the wireless card OUT OF THE MACHINE.

Once the system has re-booted and you are ready to login insert your card and it should work fine.

get into a console and as root (or SU) type iwconfig

you should see something like this

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

sit0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"belkin54g" Nickname:"greydog"
Mode:Ad-Hoc Frequency:2.462GHz Cell: 00:30:BD:91:4C:4E
Bit Rate:11Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3
Retry limit:4 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:1
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

ignore signal level -- this shows that wlan0 is alive and kicking. A ping will confirm or simply ifconfig.

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:90 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:90 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:5868 (5.7 Kb) TX bytes:5868 (5.7 Kb)

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:02:2D:5F:19:4D
inet addr:192.168.7.4 Bcast:192.168.7.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::202:2dff:fe5f:194d/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1022 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1054 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:401450 (392.0 Kb) TX bytes:209405 (204.4 Kb)
Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100


The RX and TX will tell you the card is receiving and transmitting.

The trick is a) Don't start your fixed LAN card if you also have one in the machine
b) set the wlan card to HOTPLUG
c) Insert the card AFTER you've re-booted the laptop.

BTW I still haven't got a LINKSYS Wireless-g 54mps card working yet but the 11 mps one is fine for standard Internet Access via a typical Wireless access point.



Hope some of this helps.

Hello,

I am running Suse 9.0 and also have a Orinoco Gold card. However you must either have a very early version of the gold card or the Classic Gold card because my card is completely not recognized by suse. My card is actually made by Proxim and I have been doing some research and it seems that Proxim is repackaging a completely different chipset and labeling it as the Orinoco Gold card because they bought out some big company I fogot what company it was. Anyways , the card I have is completely different from the one that the Orinoco.o driver corresponds to in Suse 9.0.

I tried downloading this driver http://savannah.nongnu.org/cgi-bin/v...inoco/orinoco/ . I cant get the darn thing to compile and install properly I keep getting this:

depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-192-athlon/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/orinoco.o
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-192-athlon/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/orinoco_cs.o
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.21-192-athlon/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/orinoco_pci.o

Also I subscribed to the mailing list at orinoco-devel@lists.sourceforge.net but all I ever get are updates on the driver and when I ask questions I never get the right answer, or I just get ignored or something.

Anyways I was wondering if you know of anything that could help me get my version of the Orinoco Gold card to work with suse 9.0 like you do thanks,

Garrett

If I had a Dollar every time I re-installed Windows I'd be sitting in the South of Spain or driving a 3rd Ferrari. !!!!!

My Card actually has LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES on the front and is the 5V (5 Volt) version. I only use it for Linux as it's the only card I can get working so far even if it's only 11 mps - still faster than my ADSL (512 kbs).

It works with SUSE's PRISM / ORINOCO modules.

If your card isn't PRISM based then you must have got a "Badged one" -- maybe a chinese / taiwanese clone.

Ensure 1) if you have a fixed lan card as well that THIS IS NOT Started on boot -- set the config to MANUAL.

2) Set the Orinoco card to start HOTPLUG

3) IF SUSE GAVE YOU A HARDWARE FOUND --LUCENT-WVLAN ORINOCO or whatever -- Don't install it -- enter skip / cancel.

4) delete the wlan-pcmcia stuff --- it's a WIRELESS CARD and the device should be WLANn where n is the number -- in my case 0.

In the network config (via YAST) don't choose PCMCIA -- ensure Wireless device.

Fill in the hardware --module should be selected automatically ORINOCO

then after YAST exits --edit again your /etc/sysconfig/network as per my previous post.

Re-boot with the CARD OUT OF THE SLOT.

after booting insert the card -- wait for around 5 secs and ping your network

should work.

No actually some weird things happend to the orinoco card, it got bought out by proxim or something and they used a completely different chipset so its completely different from the lucent one you have. The one I have is described in this thread in complete detail but as you can see in the last post I tried everything and still cant get my card to work in suse

I wonder what else I can do

At a pinch try the LINUXANT solution -- eventually you'll have to pay 19 USD but you can get a 30 day free trial.


at happens if you change the date to some time in the future and then

http://www.linuxant.com

What it does is loads the Windows XP drivers -- works a treat.
I'M now using the Linksys 54g card on another machine -- much faster (54 mps)


If you feel up to it you could also try the ndis free solution but you'll have to do a bit of compiling etc.

The time saved (for me) was WELL WORTH the 19 USD spent. -- BUT REMEMBER IT ONLY WORKS ON A SPECIFIC CARD (uses the MAC) so if you want to play with different cards don't use this method.

I just wanted to let you know that ever since I have been messing around with the wireless card, my eth0 is refusing to work properly. whenever eth0 is up now, I CANNOT RESOLVE ANY HOSTNAMES!!!!!!!!! if eth0 is down then I can dial up and resolve hostnames without a problem, but if eth0 is up, then I cannot resolve any hostnames and thus cannot connect to any sites.

What gives? I changed everything in my /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0 back to the way it was before, and I completely got rid of the wireless card in yast, and then I reconfigured the eth0 in yast back to default dhcp , the way it was when it worked. But nothing seems to work. I can configure the eth0 interface perfectly with ifconfig but after I do that then I cant ping anything or resolve any hostnames. As soon as eth0 goes down then everything is back to normal, I can ping everything, resolve hostnames etc... with ppp0 using wvdial.

What do you think it is? Any help would be greatly apreciated, because I absolutely need my eth0.

One more thing worth noting is that the router I have is setup for dhcp and eth0 accepts an ip address of 192.168.123.102 every time it boots. But like I said before I have to physically unplug my ethernet port and bring eth0 down before I can resolve any hostnames or ping anything. Thanks for the help ,

Garrett

Thank you very much for the steps in how to configure the wireless card. For the life of me I couldn't figure out why my wireless would work while eth0 was plugged in but the minute I unplugged the cat5 from eth0 the wlan card would cease working.

As I'm new to Linux (having just installed SuSE 9 Pro), how do you activate the eth0 port once you set it to manual?

TIA
Russel