I bought a Toshiba Satellite A10 laptop a few months ago, and the laptop came with a builtin wireless networking card. When I installed Red Hat 9 on my machine, the card was recognized and everything ran fine. Until today, I had no problems. Today, however, my system decided to no longer recognize the card. Now, I have no idea how to set it up (mostly because I never set it up in the first place.)

All the information that Toshiba gives me about my card is that it is " Fully wireless 802.11b Agere." Also, from running the Windows partition of my system, I know that the device is recognized, and that the IRQ is 11. The Red Hat hardware browser is slightly more specific about the device, calling it an "Intersil PRISM2 11 Mbps Wireless Adapter." The hardware browser also gives the driver, orinoco_cs.

Unfortunately, when I run the network config tool, I have no idea which card corresponds to my settings. It seems that none of them match. Some of them, when selected, say that the device does not exist (For example, the toshiba oboe.) Others don't complain, but when I set up my wireless device (eth1), if I probe the MAC address, it says the device does not exist.

I am at a loss as to what to do. I would really like to have my wireless for the convenience. Beyond that, however, I'd like to know that I can get it working should I need it.

Any events between when it stopped and when it used to work that might have had some impact on this?

modprobe and make sure orinoco_cs, hermes, and orinoco modules are loaded, if not insert them. Then run neat from the command line. call the card Lucent Orinoco and Prism II based PCMCIA wireless.

I can't think of anything that changed between Saturday, when I used it last, and today (Monday). I know I haven't changed any system settings.

As for modprobe, is the command just '/sbin/modprobe orinoco_cs'? Also, another concern about that I have is that the wireless card worked before. So wouldn't the modules already be loaded.

Finally, if I add the Lucent Orinoco and Prism II Based PCMCIA Wireless, it doesn't remember that it's there when I restart neat again.

will list all inserted modules

will load the modules. You can do all 3 in one command or as many as you need to insert.

also see if you have /etc/pcmcia/hermes.conf and if so list it's contents. There's no telling why it stopped loading and disappeared, but the above is a good place to start looking.

I don't seem to have a 'hermes.conf' file anywhere (the only hermes files I have are the library modules.)

I tried loading the modules and adding the card to the hardware in 'neat', but whenever I exit the program and reload it, it still doesn't remember my card. It will remember the device 'eth1', but even after saving the settings it won't remember my card.

I have almost given up on the GUI controls. Is there a way I can get the info I need about my card straight from command line and set up what I need to do from the command line as well?

yes, check out "man cardctl" and the files in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ beginning with ifcfg-, other related files: /etc/sysconfig/network and /etc/resolv.conf.

The problem is that the device isn't PCMCIA (at least I don't think it is.) It's a built-in wireless card. That is, it doesn't go into the PCMCIA slot on my laptop, there's just a switch to turn it on or off.

On top of that, I have a 'man' entry for cardctl but I don't actually have an executable for it ('locate cardctl' only turns up the man page.)