Hi,
I have been trying to get the Microsoft Wireless Notebook card MN-520 to work on my Fedora Core 2 installation. During the installation of Fedora 2 the power light on the card was on and the wireless indicator was blinking the whole time. Once installation was completed however, there is no power to the card. Browsing the newsgroups I've come across at least two others who have had similar problems. The discussions there and a little bit of experimentation shows that the following sequence gets the card to work and also the network to function without a problem.

Step 1. /sbin/modprobe yenta_socket

This command gets the card's power and wireless indicators on.

Step 2. /etc/init.d/pcmcia restart

This yields the output:

Shutting down PCMCIA services: done.
Starting PCMCIA services: cardmgr[3288]: watching 2 sockets
done.

At this point iwconfig lists a new ethernet interface eth1 (for me)
and gives a whole bunch of information. Next, I setup the WEP
key.

Step 3. iwconfig ethx key <WEP-KEY here>

here x is the interface #, where the card is bound.

Finally,

Step 4, ifup eth1

leading to the output:

Determining IP information for eth1... done.

And then the network starts working. I thank all the people whose posts
led to the above solution.

The only problem with the above solution is that this needs to be done every time after a boot. How can I configure linux to automatically start the card
and start the wireless network at bootup? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

More info:
The system is a SONY-VAIO PCG-FRV25 laptop
running Fedora kernel 2.6-8-1.521.

Thanks,
- Charles.

Hi,
In case anyone is still reading this. The "answer" to my question turned out to be to upgrade to Fedora Core 3. During and also after the installation
MN-520 wireless card was receiving power, and the "Network device control"
utility listed the card as an ethernet device. I simply deleted the interface,
and then used the "Internet configuration wizard" under the System Tools
menu to create a new wireless connection; selected the MN-520 wireless card from the Wireless card dialog and configured the connection (SSID, encryption key etc.). I also selected the check box to activate the connection on startup. Restarted the computer and the connection was working!

Best,
Charles.