Newbie stuck with wireless issue
 

Hello there - I'm a bit of wireless newbie (first post here too). I've decided to give Linux another spin (5th time in as many years I'm afraid!). Still this time I'm ready for it. I've read up, got hold a little teach yourself Linux and generally speaking things are looking good. Now, I've opted for Suse 9.2 on my Samsung laptop. Pretty much everything is looking good except I can't get the much needed wireless card to work. I'll give you the lowdown on what I've tried so far below but I should first say I'm writing all this in Windows from memory so spelling etc. might be a bit off.

What I've tried. The WLAN didn't seem to be working out of the box so I found a sourceforge project that has produced working drivers for the intel 2100w card I'm using. Made and installed these sucessfully (at least I think it was sucessful). So now I can start these drivers and the module (I think it's a module) by doing the following.

mount -a which tells me that /sys is busy. Perhapse I don't need to do this?
modprobe ipw2100 these seems to go fine, at least I don't see any error message

at this point if I 'iwconfig' I can see the wireless card eth1 sitting there read y to go. So next I
ifup eth1 a few messages appear and it warns me I'm not using ecryption (I've turned this off for the timebeing).

Now if I ifconfig I can see the card looks like it's working (got an ip address sucessfully and so on). At this point I thought it was all working but if I try and ping by the base station I don't get any reply and I'm kind of stuck.

I've tried ifdown eth0 and this goes off correctly.
route gives the sort of output I'd expect.

The only other thing I've tried is iptables --flush I figured the firewall might be causing issues but after issuing this command the ping command wont run.

So one thing that seems a little odd is that if I look in the Suse network card config area (I think it's hidden away under something that looks like control panel in windows) - I can see the wired LAN card configured correctly. But, the WLAN card is sitting there 'waiting to be configured'. If I try to do this I get a message saying that 'ipw-firmware isn't loaded' the process then fails. This is the message I was getting when I first installed Suse and which made be think the card didn't work out of the box. However, I'm still getting the same message - it seems that Suse doesn't know about any of the drivers that I've loaded just loaded to work with the card. Is this a bit odd and perhapse the cause of my problem?

So I'm stuck. What should I try to get some traffic over this connection? Also while I'm at it, how can I get the drivers to load when I boot (i.e. so I don't have to do the modprobe and ifup each time?). Thanks for your help! Am actually quite excited by linux at the moment.

I believe you also need the firmware package for this card.

There is are three packages to my knowledge:

tools
ipw2100 driver
firmware

Check this out:

http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/firmware.php

I also found a guide by SuSE person, but can't remember it now.

I have a Dell d600 which has a ipw2100 - I don't know SuSE at all and got very frustrated at not being able to download stuff with the crappy YaST.

I haven't had chance to pursue it, but I think i will put Ubuntu on it, or get good old Slackware on it...

Thanks for the quick reply satinet. I should have said that I already have that firmware, as far as I can tell it's being hotplugged sucessfully (I wouldn't be able to get a DHCP address otherwise would I?). I'm wondering if the firewall is blocking traffic from my wlan card. Can someone tell me the command to turn off all firewall activity? Thanks

edit: Yeh I'm already a little frustrated with YAST, it doesn't really seem to have been that helpfully yet. But then maybe I'm asking it the wrong questions.