First off, I have little linux experience outside the basics.

That being said, I took the plunge and installed Suse 9.1 on my laptop.

Now, I already know that there are all sorts of compatibility issues with the GRT series' built in wirelss chips and (to my knowledge) every linux distro ever.

So, I snagged my girlfriends Microsoft MN-520 card just to make sure I would have some sort of wireless as a fallback.

Of course, I cant get that one working either.

Following the instructions that I've found in a number of places - I get cut down pretty quickly:

bash: make: command not found

So, in trying to find a workaround, I end up getting 'checkinstall' from YaST.

Shortly thereafter, I'm met with another error:

/var/tmp/checkinstall.m10849/installscript.sh: line 4: make: command not found


So, this 'make' command that seems to be so useful and important -- is so missing from my SuSE distro, and its ruining my otherwise happy linux experience :-p

Does anyone have any ideas for me on this? A workaround, an idiot-proof wireless card brand, or maybe an actual solution? Please help!

Thanks in advance,
Al

This problem doesn't have anything to do with your wireless card. Basically you didn't install gcc and it's related packages when you installed Suse. When you type make, you are trying to run the C compiler and that error message is telling you that one isn't installed. So you need to go back to your disks and install gcc, however I can't give you details since I'm not that familiar with Suse.

I'm very much a newbie, but to get my centrino to work, I just used yast to do an update after the install and there was a centrino-related driver, so I chose to install it. Next I also used yast to delete my botched attempt to get the wireless going without the centrino driver and then clicked again to let yast find the centrino once again and this time the driver was available and it found it and all was well. The only other thing I did was to delete the notebook's ethernet card. Seemed to me that it kept trying to default to that, so once it was deleted, the notebook used the wireless connection and it works fine now. Oh, the only other thing I did was to add the router's gateway when I was configuring the wireless.

I'm sure the above might seem comical to all you seasoned users, but I was able to clumsy through it, learning perhaps the hard way, but that's what worked for me. Maybe elegant solutions will come with time, but for now, it works and priority to me.

Point being, you never mentioned using yast at all - why not?

Forrest

The guys last statement was he didn't know SuSE.

YAST, the tool you are baffled wasn't suggested, is ONLY availabe in SuSE (in my experience anyway, I've tried Mandrake, RedHat, Fedora and Gentoo), therefore he didn't mention it.

I'm quite new myself, my suggestion is don't get lippy with the 'seasoned' users if you want them to help you in the future.

Tux on my friend

Well, my original question was answered in a separate post that I made about getting my wireless working PERIOD.

As for the 'make' stuff, I could have sworn I had installed the packages -- but turns out that I hadn't.

Now @ fjoyner after playing around and following the SIMPLE instructions from a guy in my other post -- I learned a somewhat elegant way to get wireless working.

Try having wireless and your ethernet cards both activate 'on hotplug'

My problem ended up being that they were both activating on boot, and -- due to some odd construction of my notebook I guess -- the ethernet was canceling out the wireless.

After changing them to hotplug, everything works fine.


If that doesn't work for you, just type in console (as root)

ifdown eth0 <--- your ethernet
ifdown eth1 (or wlan1 - whatever yours is set as) <--- your wireless card
ifup eth1

This will shut down your ethernet card and then wireless, then start wireless. From there you can type 'iwconfig' to see if it is picking up the proper network and try pinging something.


I hope my information here is correct -- I know it worked for me and cant hurt anything to try.

-Al