I want to configure my wireless zd1211 adaptor by entering "ifconfig eth0 up" but an error occured saying : "SET failed on devide eth0; peration not supported". What does this mean?

eth0 is your ethernet card. They are labelled "ethX" starting with an X of 0, so if you had two ethernet cards, the second would be "eth1".

As for your error message it means that the "SET" operation your driver was trying to perform on you ethernet card is not supported by your card.

It looks like you have the wrong driver for your card. Also, wireless cards should be "wlan0" instead of "eth0" and they should use the "iwconfig" command instead of the "ifconfig" command.

Try googling for instructions on how to setup your wireless card for your distribution (which distro are you using BTW?)

I'm using SUSE 10.0. I tried "ifconfig wlan0 up" but linux doesn't seem to recognize wlan0 and stated "wlan0: unknown interface: no such device". Do you know what is wrong?

I don't have the answer, but I just thought I'd clear some confusion.
iwconfig is not a replacement for ifconfig.
ifconfig is for all network interfaces, be they wired or not, and iwconfig is an add-on for wireless interfaces.

Roughly explained: you set the IP with if-tools, and you set the ESSID and key with iw-tools (though in practice it is a bit more complicated: there's dhclient, wpa_supplicant...)

Yves.

Type:

dmesg | more

and look through the listing for anything to do with your network card. It should tell you if it finds it. If there's nothing, then chances are the driver is not installed at all.

Check out these sites:

http://zd1211.ath.cx/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zd1211
http://www.kernelconcepts.de/~nils/zydas1211.html