I just installed SUSE 9.1 Professional and purchased LinkSys WPC11 v3 and v4 cards. The v4 card (with the RealTek chipset) was nothing but a pain. I couldn't get the drivers from the RealTek site to insmod (Something about a wrong module format) and there were errors when I attempted to build the module myself. So, after reading about all of that ndiswrapper stuff, I said screw it and opted to put in the v3 card. This is an entirely different story. The card is recognized (cardctl ident said so), and I even get a wlan0 entry in ifconfig. The problem is getting going from there. I tried several methods of accessing the card in a fashion that should have been conducive towards getting it up and running, but to no avail. I don't know if it matters, but the card doesn't show up in lspci. Here's the output of cardctl ident:

Socket 0:
product info: "The Linksys Group, Inc.", "Instant Wireless Network PC Card", "ISL37300P", "RevA"
manfid: 0x0274, 0x1613
function: 6 (network)

Looks good, right? Even more encouraging is the output from ifconfig:

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:06:25:0B:8F:2E
inet6 addr: fe80::206:25ff:fe0b:8f2e/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:26 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100

So it seems like I have a card there... Next would be something simple, like iwconfig. So I attempted to set the ESSID...

lunix:~ # iwconfig wlan0 essid l
Error for wireless request "Set ESSID" (8B1A) :
SET failed on device wlan0 ; Operation not supported.

So now I'm lost. It knows I have a wireless card and it knows to do something with it, but why can't I set the ESSID?!

I was just looking through YaST for the drivers and more information on the card. It appears to be using the orinoco_cs module. Can anyone tell me whether or not this is in fact the correct module it should be using, and if not, how I can reconfigure it to use the correct module in order to get it working. Thanks.

The orinoco_cs driver should work fine with the WPC11 v3.
Not sure why you're getting the error trying to set the SSID, though.

Try setting the mode to managed first, then try the SSID setting.

iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed
iwconfig wlan0 essid yourssid

lunix:~ # iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed
Error for wireless request "Set Mode" (8B06) :
SET failed on device wlan0 ; Operation not supported.

Maybe something went awry in the process of trying to install the Realtek driver.
Those commands should work just fine. I'm stumped.

I am having the same problems, I have the same card and when running SuSE 9.0 Pro..card worked fine, upgraded to 9.1 and lost it. iwconfig shows the card, ifconfig shows it and so does cardctl ident but it will not give me an IP address (in the past it did). Where can I look for the shortcoming.