Hello All,
I'm a linux newbie trying to get my SuSE Linux 10.1 laptop working on my wireless network. I can enter my key (hex) in KNetworkManager and everything works. Unfortunately, I need to reenter the key every time I boot. Is there a way to configure SuSE (or linux, in general) to connect to my network on startup?

I saw on one post a suggestion to setup the network using YaST. Unfortunately, I enter the key & SID and it never connects. KNetworkManager stops working whenever I enter settings into YaST.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to configure my system to connect to a specified wireless network automatically? Is there a way to do it in KNetworkManager? If not, can it be done via the kernel? If neither is an option, does anyone have any suggestions on troubleshooting the YaST configuration?

Thannks in advance,
Steven

Well, What I would do is add the command line configuration commands you need into /etc/rc.local which is automatically loaded on bootup. I know that you wanted to do it through Knetworkmanager and YaST, but this is nearly as simple and works quite well. To do this you need to place these lines into /etc/rc.local:

iwconfig eth1 up (where eth1 is your wireless network's "name")
iwconfig eth1 essid [yoursidhere]
iwconfig eth1 key [yourkeyhere - if you need it]
dhclient eth1 (this may also be "dhcp eth1", try one and if it doesn't work try the other.)


Hopefully these commands are proving useful, and I hope that they work for you. If they don't work, or if this is all over your head right now, post back and I will see what I can do to either explain this more fully or walk you through something else. Good luck.

SuSE linux doesn't have an rc.local file.

SuSE has a configuration file for the network interfaces in the /etc/sysconfig/network directory.

If the interface is "wlan0" then you want to edit the /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan0 file.
You can change the startmode and enter the PSK key there. You may still need to run through the yast setup
and select to use the traditional method rather than using knetworkmanager. I myself haven't had much luck with knetworkmanager in SuSE 10.1.

If there is a problem with authentication, you can run wpa_cli to find out what the problem is.
su to root, then enter "wpa_cli -p /var/run/wpa_supplicant -i wlan0", where wlan0 is your wireless device.