HI,

When it comes to Linux hardware, I am really bad.Just trying to change over from windows to Linux completely and SuSE has helped me a lot in that respect

I would appreciate any help from guys out there with similar issues/experiences

OS: SuSE 8.2 Professional
Wireless PCMCIA card: Gigafast WF721AEX 802.11b(I think its basically a TI card)

Issue: I am able to connect to the net throught the ethernet card built into by Laptop(Sony VAIO) but not thru the wireless card

SuSE detects my network card correctly- as a Texas instruments card but somehow I cant connect to the net...
I tried the following commands and heres the result

#ifconfig

Result:
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 08:00:46:9E:C0:CA
inet6 addr: fe80::a00:46ff:fe9e:c0ca/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:9 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:3270 (3.1 Kb)
Interrupt:9 Base address:0x4000 Memory:e8200000-e8200038

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:52 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:52 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:3552 (3.4 Kb) TX bytes:3552 (3.4 Kb)

#dmesg | grep eth[0-9]
e100: eth0: Intel(R) PRO/100 VE Network Connection
eth0: no IPv6 routers present
eth0: no IPv6 routers present


#/etc/init.d/network restart

It restarts the intel pro 10/100 connection(says backgrounding in absence of ethernet cable) but skips restarting the Wireless ethernet saying Hotplug in the status...

Is there some service thats missing...
I would appreciate any help from anyone....

What's up with the IPv6 stuff?

It looks like it's giving hex code for a IPv6 address...but no address. That's weird.

Usually wireless card will be eth1.

If you go into your network settings can you see a wireless card or anything on eth1?

Yeah, its a TI card, SuSe is seeing it for what it is, but it doesn't have a driver for that bugger. TI refused to release specs, so there's a bit of a muddle to get it working. Its the ACX100 chipset. Here's a link to the two driver sets:

acx100.sourceforge.net

and one of the members here has a really good walkthrough on how to fight this thing into submission:

www.houseofcraig.net

Cheers,

Finegan

Oops, just saw Finegan's post, actually the url is www.houseofcraig.net/acx100_howto.php the other url just leads you to my blog, and my wife's bookclub and my friend's blog...


do an lspci -v and see if Texas Instruments shows up, here's what mine looks like:
if yours is like this (mainly the 8400 and 8402 #'s) then you've got an acx100 card, I've got a howto with a pre-compiled module for this chipset here: (sorry, no suse modules yet, but you may benefit from the instructions on how to compile it on your own machine)
http://www.houseofcraig.net/acx100_howto.php
this should get you going.

if your numbers aren't the same then post the output of lspci -v relevant to the network controller and we'll try to ID the right driver for it.

This is what lspci -v yields
==================================
Network Controller: Texas Instruments ACX 100 22MBPS Wireless Interface
Subsystem: Unknown Device 16a5:1801
Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 9
I/O ports at 4400 [size=32]
Memory at 20800000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
Memory at 20810000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2

I cant understand much from this.I am also reading through the site you gave currently.Havent finished readin it yet...meanwhile if this(the above) helps....let me know

I am running the 2.4.20 kernel...which rpm should I download from the site you mentioned....


Thanks much for all your replies and efforts

Yep, as Finegan has said, you've got an acx100 card, your numbers don't match, but the "22MBPS" gives it away, not to mention the blatant mention of "ACX 100",

The page I mentioned is a howto I put together for this card along with some pre-compiled modules for a few distros, I was unsuccessful in my attempts to get/burn the SuSE live eval, so I don't have anything for it yet. There are no rpms or slackware pkg's there yet as I am not yet fully versed in creating them.


Instead, start at the beginning, read carefully. In your case you should download the slack9 module and follow the instructions step-by-step, when you get to last section: "configuring the module" the howto will fail you as I have never done that on SuSE, when you get that far and run into a snag, post back.

forgot to mention this: while the kernel version for your SuSE matches the Slackware 9.0 kernel version, this is not a guarantee that the slack module will load in SuSE without incident, this depends on other things also like which version of gcc and which library versions SuSE is using. If it fails to load, post the error message(s) and we'll see if you'll need to compile it yourself, this is really easy once you get a couple of things set up, namely the kernel source installed and cvs installed, and these may already be installed.