I just upgraded from RH 9 to SUSE 9 and i can't get my wireless network card to work. The card is a Netgear MA 311 and I know that the chipset is a prisim II. Its the second network card on my computer.

try www.linux-wlan.com for drivers

If you are getting lights on your card but it will not get on the net.

Try this. I got this info here on the forum:

"I'm not at my machine right now, but from memory... to test if the nic is having problems with the wireless, at a terminal login as root and type: ifdown eth0 (this turns the nic off)
test to see if you have internet after this. This is assuming that the wireless has an ip from your router. During the boot process, linux activates the nic before the pcmcia... and it defaults to using the nic for internet. That's why I turned eth0 to manual start. You can get to this setting in YaST... it is startmode='manual' the configuration is at /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0 ...I believe."

This worked for me.

i forgot to mention its a pci card. I was trying to mess around with it and noticed that SUSE detects the card and loads up the hostp_pci driver but i know from using Redhat that the correct driver is orinoco_pci. I still can't get this stupid thing to work!!!!

Suse has been playing juggle the monkey with drivers since there are actually 3 really good drivers for these cards. The in-kernel driver is orinoco, but the hostap modules do a much better job with prism2 cards... and trust me I'm a huge proponent of the orinoco set, so that's a little pride swallowing to post this. the hostap set starts the card in Master mode as opposed to where you need it, which is managed mode. Check what the output of "iwconfig" is, and post that back here.

Also, I'm bouncing this to the wireless forum as we're doing some house cleaning

Cheers,

Finegan

OK Finegan, here is what i get when i type "iwconfig"

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"test"
Mode:Master Frequency:2.422GHz Acces Point:00:09:5b:BB:2f
Bit Rate:11Mb/s Sensitivity=1/3
Retry min limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt: Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:7 Missed beacon:0

sit0 no wireless extensions.

Yeah, Suse switched to the host_ap modules, which start in master mode by default, go figure... you're machine is set up right now to be an access point. This will change it:

iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
iwconfig wlan0 essid RealNameOfNetwork
iwconfig wlan0 enc 12321321312321 (if you are using WEP)

dhcpcd wlan0

Now it should grab an IP, if that works, check back and we'll sort out how to script it, funny though that Yast2 isn't doing it right.

Cheers,

Finegan

Hey Finegan,
I did what you said and got stuck at dhcpcd wlan0

here is the output:

dhcpcd-hook: Skipping 'ifdown $INTERFACE -o dhcp' call

THEN I TYPED IWCONFIG AND THIS IS THE OUTPUT THAT I GOT

lo no wireless extensions.

sit0 no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"RealNameOfNetwork"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.422GHz Acces Point:44:44:44:44:44:44
Bit Rate:2Mb/s Sensitivity=1/3
Retry min limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:1232-1321-3123-2100-0000-0000-00 Security mode:restricted
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0/92 Signal level:-69 dBm Noise level:-90 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

I HAVE NO FERKING CLUE WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THIS CARD ANYMORE!!!

OK, I started from the beginning and reinstaled SUSE. I still can't get the card to work!!!!

sasquash: finegan was giving examples of you SSID name and WEP key.

According to your iwconfig dump (if correct) you actually used the example SSID and WEP key given by finegan. Hence, no association with the actual AP.

Try your SSID and WEP key if you are using them. Were it says access point: 44.44.44..... should actually be a MAC and your link quality would need to be a bit above 0/92.