I have a D-Link DWL-520 rev. E wireless PCI network card. Using the HostAP drivers and available firmware, I have been able to get this card to work properly on my Fedora Core 2 installation thanks to directions that I found on a link posted in the HCL.

Here's the interesting part ...

I installed SuSE 9.1 and installed the same HostAP drivers, following the same directions and using the exact same software. As a matter of fact, I even copied the firmware files and ifcfg-wlan0 configuration from my known working Fedora installation.

When loading the HostAP module and checking iwconfig, the card shows up with no problem. However, when I do an ifup wlan0, it returns the following lines (or at least something very similar:

No matter what I do, I can't get the card to pull down a DHCP address, even though I'm using the exact same configuration as my Fedora installation is using. I've even gone as far as to use the YaST tools to re-write the ifcfg-wlan0 file to make sure I wasn't missing any settings.

What's really maddening is that I'm not seeing any errors what-so-ever. The module loads fine, the firmware is pushed to the card and reports ready, iwconfig and ifconfig see that the card is there, but ifup just won't work.

I've restarted the computer many times, i've restarted networking even more times. I'm just at a loss.

Any thoughts?

<edit>See post below for the fix</edit>

I finally got this card to work properly after some fiddling.

The trick is to get the firmware loaded during the boot procedure. You'll need to follow the instructions on the following site for downloading and installing the HostAP drivers and the card firmware, but ignore the setup and iwconfig steps:

http://home.columbus.rr.com/andrewbarr/dwl520e1.html


Once you've installed the module and configured the utilities, you'll need to do the following

1. Edit /etc/init.d/boot.local
2. Put in the following lines:

Putting these lines in boot.local allow for the firmware to be pushed to the network card before the system tries to bring it up.

3. Open Yast, and go to the Network device configuration.
4. Delete any existing detected wireless NIC and create one from scratch. By default, SuSE will detect a Prism 2 based wireless device. Go ahead and select this NIC and continue into the configuration.
5. Change the module from orinico to hostap_pci.
6. Change the default wireless device name (should be something like wlan-pci-bus-0000:000) to wlan0.
7. Save your network configuration.
8. Test your connection to see if it's working by opening up Konsole, using su to get to root.
9. Type in the two lines given above to load the firmware to the card.
8. Run the following command to verify your network card loads:

9. You should see the wlan0 get an IP addressed assigned to it through DHCP (assuming that you're using DHCP of course).
10. Reboot your machine and watch the fun. You should see the firmware load to your NIC during the boot process, followed by the configuation of the NIC with an IP address.

Hope this keeps someone else from pulling out their hair like I've been doing.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Wireless Networking and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Some additional notes about my previous posting...

I re-installed SuSE 9.1 from scratch and went through the process again to make sure that I had all of the steps down. Here's some additional information that might be helpful:

1. SuSE does install the Wireless Tools by default, and they work properly.
2. SuSE has an older version of the HostAP module that can be installed. DO NOT USE IT. Use version 0.2.0 or later.
3. After you've installed SuSE, reboot your computer. Otherwise, your machine won't recognize wlan0 properly.
4. Make sure when editing the hostap_fw_load file that the firmware file names match the case of the actual file name. If it's RF010803.HEX in the hostap_fw_load file and rf010803.hex in the actual directory, you're going to have problems.

Hope this helps someone else out there.