Hi

I use SuSE 10.1 on my IBM Thinkpad T22 and all in all I'm luvin it however I've got a huge problem with the wireless setup on my IQSystems UK PCMCIA wireless adaptor.

I know it works on SuSE 10.1 because I've being using it. However for some reason completely out of the blue SuSE refuses to let me use it under ndiswrapper. It keeps wanting to install it with the prism54 driver:

"Intersll ISL3890[Prism GT/Prism Duette]/ISL3886[Prism Javelln/Prism Xbow]"

and autmatically gives it the device name "eth1"

The problem with this driver is that though I guess it works it does not work properly especially since commands like

iwlist eth1 scan
iwconfig eth1 essid <network ID>

do not work. Moreover KNetwork Manager also wants to set everything up again and ignore the configurations I make in YaST.

When I turn that off and use ndiswrapper it worked fine. However after a system crash where I had to restart the laptop ndiswrapper has been completely over-ridden by SusE installing the card as eth1 and does not accept anything I do for this card in ndiswrapper.

So I was just wondering if there was anyway to stop SuSE altomatically installing network cards it recorgnises, so that I can manually install the ndiwrapper driver and set that to automatically connect at boot.


thanks

You should be able to go into YaST2 -> Network -> Network Devices and delete the interface. Then click on "Add" and add it again, but this time, don't select the "Select from List" button. Instead, select Device Type "Wireless", for Hardware Configuration name, if it is empty, enter something like "static-1". For module name enter ndiswrapper. I guess in your case you need to also select the PCMCIA box. Under the advanced setting, you probably want to select to have it start on hotplug, since you may disconnect or reconnect the wireless card.

Click Next and enter your Wireless device settings, such as Managed, WPA-PSK, essid and the Key that the access point uses.

Hi jschiwal

thanks for your response. Sadly YaST automatically adds the hardware configuration once I delete the original and won't let me delete the new one until I've entered configuration details clicked finish and reload YaST2 -> Network -> Network Devices. But again I delete and the same thing happens.

If I ignore it and just add a new interface and call it say wlan1 ndiswrapper does not detect it. Instead it detect the card as eth1 but i can't configure this in YaST and not sure how to do the static IP addressing and WPA-TIPK stuff and set it to automatically load and connect at boot-time in ndiswrapper. I can do this with unencrypted networks and WEP keys but not with WPA.

Select the interface in the list and click on edit. Then click on the advanced drop down box and select "Hardware Details". You should be able to change the module to "ndiswrapper" and the hardware configuration name to "static-1".

If that doesn't work, you might try manually editing your /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan0 file.

I'm not sure how being a pcmcia card might effect this. I changed the startmode on my ifcfg-wlan0 file and blotted out the wireless key.

See the "man ifcfg" manpage for more information on this file.