Hi, I am having problems with my wireless card on my notebook. It is a Belkin Wireless G notebook card. I am running openSUSE 10.3 and it is not working. It worked with Ubuntu before but it is not working now. I really need to get this up and running. If you can help that would be great. I don't know the specific name of the card right off hand, but will find out soon. It was the cheap one you can buy at Wal-Mart.

Welcome to LQ!

We're going to need a little bit better information about the card than that. The make and model would be nice, but the chipset it uses is essential.
Just out of curiosity, was there a particular reason you dumped Ubuntu for Suse? Personally, I'm a big fan of sticking with something that works. Now that said, if it worked in Ubuntu, it should work in Suse, it is just a matter of figuring out what kind of card it is.

The model number of the wireless card is F5D7010. I'm not sure where to find the chipset, but here is another number that seems important, P57462-C.

I switched to Suse because I was having some other problems with Ubuntu.

Oh God, not another one. OK, this is either going to go smoothly or it is going to be complete and unmitigated, unrelenting hell. The whole Belkin 5FD70x0 series should be thrown in the nearest trash can and their executives flogged, but that is a rant for another time.


In their infinite wisdom, Belkin used at least two different chipsets in those, one from RALink which might work in Linux because there is a native driver, and one from Broadcom, which almost never works. In a console, try running (as root) the command lspci and see if that identifies the card. You can save the output to a text file by using redirection (lspci > filename.txt) and then the output of the command is saved in the file and you can easily open it in a text editor and copy and paste.

I ran the lspci and this is what I got.

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8363/8365 [KT133/KM133] (rev 80)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8363/8365 [KT133/KM133 AGP]
00:0a.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ601/6912/711E0 CardBus/SmartCardBus Controller
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8231 [PCI-to-ISA Bridge] (rev 10)
00:11.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:11.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 1e)
00:11.4 Bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 ACPI (rev 10)
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 40)
00:11.6 Communication controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 20)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 51)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. VT8636A [ProSavage KN133] AGP4X VGA Controller (TwisterK) (rev 01)

Thanks for the help.

I think that is a wired ethernet card, in which case your wireless card isn't listed. Is it by any chance a USB wireless dongle rather than a proper wireless card?

No it is a card not a usb dongle. I hooked up a Ethernet cable for the installation, and that works, but the card does not.

I'm going to suggest a couple of ways to figure out what is in that card.

First, it might be a good idea to install lshw, which is a very good tool for looking at what hardware you've got. You might check your favorite Suse repository and see if it is there, otherwise it isn't hard to compile from source.

The second (and probably much easier) way would be to boot Ubuntu as a live CD. If Ubuntu recognizes the card, we can take a look at the kernel modules that were loaded (using the lsmod command) and figure out which driver Ubuntu used.

I ran lspci on Ubuntu and this is what I got.

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8363/8365 [KT133/KM133] (rev 80)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8363/8365 [KT133/KM133 AGP]
0000:00:0a.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ601/6912/711E0 CardBus/SmartCardBus Controller
0000:00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8231 [PCI-to-ISA Bridge] (rev 10)
0000:00:11.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
0000:00:11.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 1e)
0000:00:11.4 Bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 ACPI (rev 10)
0000:00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 40)
0000:00:11.6 Communication controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 20)
0000:00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 51)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. VT8636A [ProSavage KN133] AGP4X VGA Controller (TwisterK) (rev 01)
0000:02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc.: Unknown device 001a (rev 01)

Actually I had asked for the output of lsmod, not lspci, but since your wireless card showed up (at least I think this is it) we can do with this. You still might want to post the output of lsmod so we can double check that the Atheros driver is being used.

The really good news is that Atheros is one of the good guys in Linux wireless. The madwifi project has drivers that work very well with Atheros cards. This also probably explains why Ubuntu sees the card but Suse doesn't. The original madwifi driver uses something called HAL, which is not open source and is distributed only as a binary blob, and most distros won't include it. I think Ubuntu is one of the exceptions.

There are a few howtos and installation guides on the madwifi site, so have a read through them and let us know if you've got questions on how to proceed. You also might dig around your favorite repository and see if someone has created a Suse package for madwifi.