Hi folks, I hope someone can help.

Brief: I'm having trouble setting up my wireless PCMCIA card on SuSE 9.0 - it's a netgear MA401 (which I was told runs out of the box on suse 9.0).

Hardware: SuSE 9.0 distribution. It's a Paceblade Pacebook tablet PC 600 MHz and has been hard work to set up. Wireless PCMCIA card Netgear MA401. It also has built in ethernet card Realtek 8139 (configured as eth0 by YaST).

Kernel: 2.4.23 with PCMCIA built in kernel not external

Problem: I plug the card in whilst SuSE is up and running and it seems to load some modules. The "link" light stays on. But that's as far as I get. I've looked at some howto's but I'm none the wiser.

Output from lsmod:
---
orinoco 36052 0 (unused)
hermes 6372 0 [orinoco]
---

orinoco not orinoco_cs??

ifconfig does not see anything other than lo and eth0. If I ifdown eth0 then it only sees lo. Output from iwconfig:

eth0 no wireless extensions
lo no wireless extensions
sit0 no wireless extensions

The Suse wireless howto-thing says YaST can configure the card if iwconfig recognises it. It doesn't, still I proceed with YaST. The card is correctly identified by YaST and I can set my ESSID / DHCP setting etc. This configuration is saved as /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan-pcmcia

I've renamed it ifcfg-eth1 to attempt to talk to it with ifconfig, but output from:

>ifup eth1
> could not get a valid interface name: -> skipped

What do I need to tweak?

Thanks.

I've not used SuSE in years....but here are a few things you might try.

***Disclaimer***
I'm new to wireless on linux too....so this may not work

First, my distro uses wlan0 for the wireless card. So you might try bringing wlan0 up instead of eth1.

Second, even with wlan0 down, iwconfig still finds my router and shows the SSID. So....is your router set to broadcast it's SSID?

Also, from what I've read online, it looks like SuSE may use either wlan0, eth1, or wifi0.

If you're not using encryption, try the following:

ifconfig <network_interface> <local IP address> netmask 255.255.255.0

If it succeeds in assigning a static IP to the interface, you should see it in the list when you run ifconfig.

Since we haven't specified a default gateway yet, you won't have internet access, but you should at least be able to ping your router.

If you can ping the router, at least you know it's not a problem with the card or the driver.

I have it up!

Thanks for you input - I tried your suggestions but no luck. So I got out the SuSE CD, did a back up and reinstalled. The first thing I did after the fresh installation was check to see if the wlan worked.

Plugged the card in but had to manually modprobe orinoco_cs, called yast and configured the card. Added the line WIRLESS='yes' to the file ifcfg-wlan-pcmcia. Now when I call ifconfig I get a line for wlan0!!! Can't write the full output because I'm on winbloze at the mo!

Next job is to see if I can recomile my kernel AND keep the wlan functionality - does anyone know if SuSE have patches on their default kernel to do with wlan? I *have* to recompile to get full functionality out of the paceblade (mostly ACPI). Paceblade provide pathes against vanilla and I got a shed load of errors trying the paceblade pathes on SuSE kernel 2.4.21-144.

Thanks again.

No luck upgrading to 2.4.23. I'm confident I didn't miss out any kernel options - some googling is necessary.

Thoughts anyone?