Hi,

I am running gnome on opensuse 11.4. Using networkmanager to connect to the internet with wifi. However, sometimes networkmanager is very slow (up to 1 minute) to connect once the computer has been inactive for a while.

So, I think I will try to connect manually, and see if the problem is networkmanager. But, the problem I have is that I cant seem to connect with the console commands at all.

I tried ifup wlan0. But it just says its already active! And I have no interent connection. I tried to ping my wireless router, but its saying "no network".

Can anyone guide me as to what I should type to connect Pls. ?

What you do next depends on what type of security you have enabled on your wireless router. If your using WPA2 personal ( i hope you are) you will need to use wpa_supplicant to start the access point association so you can resolve an IP address.. I bet your just not getting associated and aren't getting an IP address from your router. You need to edit your wpa_supplicant config and then issue a command like wpa_supplicant -Dwext -Iwlan0 -c /path to config . I've not used SuSe in forever and they may already have a config file somewhere else. Your wpa_supplicant config file should have your WPA2 shared key in it and should declare your ssid etc.. they usually have examples in the default config . It's best to find the default one that came with the distro and create a back up of that file and then edit it for your purposes. Once you get associated you will need to issue a dhclient -i wlan0 or dhcpcd wlan0 depending on which dhcp client you have installed. I'm in a similar situation and am still working out how to get these commands to run automatically which you will want to do .

Thanks,

It seems you were fairly close to the problem. I checked the wireless interface and it was true - no ip address assigned yet. But it seems wpa_supplicant was already running and paired with the access point (the name of the wireless router was there with iwconfig). So all I had to do was type:
to get an ip address.

Kind regards
Aubrey.

Cool now all you have to do is set that to start with boot so your not having to issue those commands over and over again. To make things easier you may want to install wpa_gui , also take some time to read over this http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:WiFi#wpa_gui pay special attention to the section about connecting to wireless without networkmanager. I too have been like you and have been using networkmanagers as a crutch and I've recently made it a point to become proficient with the console and wireless networking, which can be cumbersome to say the least. I have to say that doing it manually tends to speed up boot times and trims the fat of your system.