Okay, familiar with windows, virginal linux newbie
I partitioned and installed suse 9.2 with KDE on my HP Pavilion laptop with celeron
from the DVD image--impressed by linux--
setup seemed virtually plug and play- every other piece of hardware works peachy
it named my pcmcia wireless card as RTL8180L MAC- and set it default as pci ethernet/ nothin'
I changed the config in Yast to wireless pcmcia/ still nothin' it's dead
My Windows driver called it RTL8180 Wireless LAN (Mini-) PCI NIC
I'm guessing the problem is the ?"driver"? ?"module"?
I have no idea what a rpm or wrapper is? ?tarball?
Someone help me, please- but be gentle

Suse has ndiswrapper installed, all you have to do is:

1. make sure the wireless card is plugged in

2. get the proper drivers, and extract them to your desktop

the way i get the drivers is; I happen to have a speedstream usb network lan card that i bought at bestbuy for $15. Linux always has the drivers for it. I configure it in the control center, and I then just grab the drivers and download them.

3. open a terminal as root (type su, then enter)

4. type ndiswrapper -i /home/knoppix/desktop/drivers (or where ever you put the drivers)

5. take out the wireless card

6. type ndiswrapper -m

7. type modprobe ndiswrapper

8. insert the card

9. configure the wireless card & security in Yast.

also check out:

using ndiswrapper

one other thing, if ndiswrapper is not already installed, go to yast>>>>>install software>>>>and type in ndiswrapper, you can install it from there

I installed driver
in terminal:
linux:/home/jamon # ndiswrapper -l
Installed ndis drivers:
drivers hardware NOT present
net hardware NOT present
net8180 hardware NOT present
rtl8180 hardware NOT present
and the card works fine in xp!??

Now I'm wondering if the driver was the problem at all...
if I plug it in...YaST detects it
in YaST Network card configured:
name/ device/ ip address/
Realtek RTL8180L... wlan-bus-pcmcia DHCP
no leds!!!
am i doing something wrong
it is set up to my network
if it is detected why not at least an occasional yellow or green flash?

what does your iwconfig say? also, when you installed the drivers w/ndiswrapper did you type:

ndiswrapper -i /home/your name/NET8180.INF

(NET8180 is an example, but the file to be used should end in .INF)

when you type ndiswrapper -l it should say:

ndiswrapper installed
RTL8180 hardware present

or

RTL8180

on all the distros i have tried, and gotten wireless working, they either say hardware present, or nothing at all.

did you get any errors typing ndiswrapper -m or modprobe ndiswrapper?

last question...did you take the card out before typing ndiswrapper -m and modprobe ndiswrapper? make sure you did, i had a lot of problems before i found this out. once that is done, reinsert your card, and your card should be found...then you set up your wep or wpa in yast

one more thing: while configuring your card in Yast, make sure that you name the card "ndiswrapper"