Installing SuSe 10.1 on an old gateway computer
 

I am staying at a friends place for several more weeks and have an old gateway machine running XP which is a cloned copy. Of course it can't be updated. Anyway I ordered a copy of Suse 10.1 to put on this machine. I would like to keep the XP on it but I can't remember if Suse (I have it running on a couple of machines at home) lets me partition the disk so I can dual boot (one of my machines dual boots back home).
gateway Pent III
497 mhz
128 mb ram

I also need to know what sort of problems might crop up when I try to connect to her wireless network. Are there any tricks I need to know. This is a cheap PCI NIC on this old machine (the NIC is new) it is a Foxconn WLL-3350 IEEE 802.11b.

thank you, Tim

Suse will slide the partitions around as needed during the install. It'll also set up the boot loader for dual boot. It's really quite easy. Check the Suse site as I'm sure there are instructions about this. Can't be sure about the wireless, but Suse is the first distro I ever used to connect to a wireless network and it worked just fine. This was several years ago on Suse 8.2 I think? Long before 802.11g. It'll probably work with minimal effort.

As for tricks... Just make sure that your friend isn't filtering by MAC address on the wireless router. Also, disable WEP or whatever until you get it working. This just eliminates confusion. Yes it's bad to turn off security on a wireless network, but it will decrease the frustration as you get things working. You can (and should) increase the security once you get things going.

Well, I have Suse running on the machine but I cannot figure out how to connect to the wirless network. I used YaST/network devices/network card to configure the card and KNetworkManager. But it is not connecting to the network. How do I get it to scan for my wireless network?

Tim Maddux

is the wifi card recognized in yast?

are you running KDE?

Try running knetworks if so and see if you can pick up any SSIDs...

can you see any wifi APs?

I went ahead and reinstalled suse.
I am using KDE.
During the setup I put in the information about my wifi card and when running the internet connection test it fails to find my wireless network card.
The message is: interface wlan-default is not available.
So I am stuck on the setup screen to download updates.

Tim

Time to do a search for the model of your wireless card including Linux. Then find out which module you need to load. If you can get that far, we can probably get it working with iwconfig commands. I have a script that I use in Slackware. I will post it here if you think it would help.

the information I got with the card is not very helpful. I will check the disk. It is a Foxconn WLL-3350 PCI Wireless Adapter and from the comments left by people that purchased it they had no problem setting it up in Ubuntu. I have gone ahead and finished setting up the installation . . . setup never found the wireless nic . . . I guess I will keep working with it.

Tim

Well, I have done a little research and find that it the wireless nic is a Micro-Star International RT 2500 802.11G PCI card
I located a source to download the drivers for the RT 2500 chipset (I guess that's what it is) but cannot figure out how to use them. Of course I cannot directly download to the Suse machine. Anyway, I am lost and don't know where to turn now. I guess I am getting old . . . this stuff used to easier for me LOL.

I know these sorts of things are frustrating. Stick with it. If I have some more time I will investigate it for you more but I'm buried in other work right now. Please don't give up though!

also search for updated firmware for your wifi nic. In suse 10.0 I had a hell of a time to get my 2200bg card working. I had to run firmware updates and everything.

I found almost everything off of sourceforge.net

Check this link Thats how I got my RT2500 working after trying different sources for weeks. Hope it will help.
http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/05/1...-rt2500-wi-fi/

Hi yesfixit,

I found that site also. And after hours of work I have installed all the kernel-source, gcc and gcc++ or something like that. Did all the command to get the system ready but I run into a road block on the ~> make command in the module folder that I extracted into a folder. The instructions say to go to that folder (I imagine using the root shell). I do that but when I try to run the command I get -bash: /root: is a directory

All my books on Linux are back home and my memory isn't that good anymore. I can't figure out what the system is trying to tell me, but I am closer than I was a couple of days ago.

Tim

I got it installed using the site show above. Once loaded it picked up the card and loaded the drivers. So one battle down and one more left. It will not connect to the network. KNetworkManager get to about 28% and then will not go any farther. In the morning I will go back and double check my settings. But it is picking up the network so I am closer.

Tim

Now you've done the hardest part. See if you can use KDE's KWiFiManager to set the settings and get a connection. If that fails there's more that can be done but that's pretty easy to try out.

I did use yast to configure the wireless setup. wlan-ra0 and it worked after the reboot. Its only a matter of you to make all settings right.(assume you are OK with wireless setup)