The system spec is SUSE 10 running on a Dell Inspiron 1200 with a old Compaq wireless card.

The wireless card is recognized by Linux. No problem there. No need for ndiswrapper.

While the laptop is booting up, I notice a message saying "DHCP client not running". However, after logging in, I do a "ps aux | grep dhcp" and get the following:

/sbin/dhcpcd -C -D -K -N -t 999999 -h Inspiron1200 -c
/etc/sysconfig/network/scripts/dhcpcd-hook wlan0

My question is do I have a dhcp client running or not? The problem is I am not getting a dynamic IP address from my router. I have to use a static IP.

Please help with some hints. Thank you.

Have you tried running dhcpcd after startup?

Thank you for your reply.

By trialing and erroring, I am finally able to do dynamic IP by doing the following steps:

1. Uninstalling wap_supplicant. Suse 10.0 installed and ran wap_supplicant by default. I don't have WAP, only WEP. Before the uninstallation, I had to do "iwconfig wlan0 essid string key string" manually to get a connection with my router.

At this point I still had to do static IP.

2. Do "route add default gateway GatewayIPAddress" to finally be able to do dynamic IP.