Wireless connection issue with Suse 9.1 and Dell TrueMobile 1300
 

I have had little success trying to connect to my wireless network (NetGear 814v2 router) from my dell D600 running Suse 9.1. The installation went without any problem but the wireless is still an issue. Moreover I believe that I managed to damage two routers in the process (I did not think it was possible) and now they drop the connection within a few minutes without any possibility to restore it unless I unplug them :-(

I have downloaded the latest windows drivers for the trueMobile from the Dell website. First the download shows two different versions of the driver (AF and IR directories). So far I have tried both without any success.

I have tried DriverLoader from LinuxAnt and followed the instructions, I used YAST to attempt to configure the card afterward. At the end, I can issue a iwconfig command and see that the wlan0 interface has an address IP, but no connection is possible.

In addition, it seems that once the wireless interface is up, it never times out and switches to the wired interface and I was wondering if there was a way to fix that. How can we define the order of priorities for the network interfaces.

Last, (supposing that I manage to get the connection working). how would I switch from one wireless network to the other and how can I probe for available network

thanks for the help, especially if you can help me make the wireless connection. I will wait and see if I get some answers before I go buy a third router to give it another try

david

well, a dell true mobile card is an orinoco card, you need to load the module for that driver. you need to make sure you have wireless-tools installed (or whatever the package is that provides iwconfig) i have pump installed to pull a dhcp lease, thats what i recommend, once you have the orinoco driver loaded, do a "ifconfig -a" and see if you see your wireless ethernet card, then use iwconfig to set the ssid and key (if you have a specific ssid and key set) and then try pulling a dhcp lease (i use pump so it's "pump -i <interface>", on my box it's eth0 so i use "pump -i eth0"). as for breaking your router, that sucks if thats the case :(

I thought the truemobile 1300 was a broadcom card? Are you sure about it?

david

sorry about that, i didn't pay attention to the cardnumber, your right. you might want to go ahead and contact the linuxant people, i've heard their pretty good about support. for a while dell's truemobile cards were just orinoco cards which made them extremely easy to use.