I am running Mandriva 2006 on my IBM Thinkpad 600x. All is well, apart from the wifi card. It is detected and runs perfectly but the connection is dropped every so often -- but regularly. This happens regardless of the network ie it happens at work and home. It is obviously easy to reconnect in Mandriva - I only have to remove the card and reinsert it. I don't know whether this is a kernel issue or a card driver problem. The card is a Asus WL-107g.
Cheers

Is Mandriva running this directly, or have you been required to install wireless wrapper and the associated driver? Dropping connections often points to a slightly buggy driver which may need updating, or possibly looking at updating the firmware. It's not such a daunting prospect. What module is currently running the card, which driver was used (if any), and have you enabled encryption?

Yes. mandriva detects all ..... ndiswrapper is not needed. it seems to me that the driver is corrupt --- I booted Mepis to see what would happen and the wifi connection stayed up for hours ie it did not fail. all things rt2500 on mandriva 2006 fail... What I need to know is how to update the driver "within" the parameters of Mandriva..

I use Asus WL-107g at Fedora. It also drops sometimes. But when the laptop is close to the wireless modem, it doesn't drop. I also use the card in Windows XP and it drops much more there. So I guess this is a driver problem.

I believe you're right about the driver. I have an rt2500usb (Belkin F5D7050) that was unusable. I really thought I had wasted my money. I could be two feet from the router and not connect. I did some googling on the subject, and it seems this chipset/driver combo is really flaky.

Two days ago I found a new Windows driver package on the Ralink support site, which I downloaded and installed in Windows. Then I grabbed the driver off my Windows partition and installed it in Suse with ndiswrapper. The connection is ROCK STABLE in both OS's. In fact, I'm wireless right now and loving it...

Try looking on the Ralink site. They may have something that will help...

Timothy.

I have installed Mepis and everything now works as I want it to. Mandriva failed on the wifi front so was removed. Kubuntu worked well but there is a bug in the cups system that did not play fair with my network printers. Mepis it is, then (I seem to be back with Debian Unstable )

Just an update here for anyone coming across this problem. I have installed Slackware 10.2 on the 600x and compiled my own driver for the rt2500 and it is faultless --- whether close to the access point or at the transmission limit.