wireless card active no connection to router
 

okay here is my problem in as much detail as possible........

I just installed SUSE 10.1 had it up and running with the open linksys at my friends house but it was terribly slow as i installed every single package possible. I tried removing packages manually and messed it all up. SO i reinstalled and started over and now it runs great i did install network and security package and i'm running KDE for gui with a lucent orinoco gold card and from what i can tell everything still comes up and linux can see the card the same.


Now the problem over here the dlink router is using wep enabled inet which i tried disabling but no such luck. i have no idea how to see if i have a ip address but i'm guess no because when i try to ping out all i get is CONNECT: network is unreachable i have put in the wep key and ssid using yast although i don't know if essid is the same as ssid although it is set the same

KWiFiManager says no acces point unavailabe local ip unavailable and it never changes frequencies and if i scan for networks nothing is found

KNetworkManager says no network device found which i believe isn't a good thing usually so can someone please help me as i am very confused

also am tired of stealing windows so i would really appreciate this to work this is my business machine

OK, lets take this from the top. First thing to do is ignore Yast for the time being and use a console.

Check the outputs of iwconfig and ifconfig. The iwconfig should show you if a wireless card is actually recognized and configured and ifconfig will show you if you have an IP address. In fact, posting the outputs of those two commands will help in getting you up and running.

And welcome to LQ!

eth1 is as fallows


iwconfig:

IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"" Nickname:"HERMES I"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: None
Bit Rate:2mb/s Sensitivity:1/3
Retry limit:4 Rts thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encrypstion key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=0/92 Signal Level=134/153 Noise Level=134/153
Rx Invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx Excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

which looks like to me none of my settings ever went into effect even with a reboot unless settings change from root to user which would be stupid but i guess possible idk lol i'm not the expert :) so it is there and it is wireless but no wireless settings for the router here and then i guess the other thing i'm worried about is once i get it working with this router will i still be able to roam to my friends router without messing it up?

ifconfig:

link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:02:2d:52:8c:df
up broadcast multicast MTU:1500 Metrick:1
Rx Packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
Tx Packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
Rx bytes:0 (0.0 b) Tx bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:3 Base address:0xc100
^this means abosolutly nothing to me other then it hasn't sent anything it looks like a monitor for network traffic through each device?? well thanx for having patients with me

and thankyou for the welcome :)

Just a friendly reminder: Punctuation is your friend.

You are definitely not configuring this card using Yast. So rather than monkey around with it, try configuring with iwconfig in a console. Check out the iwconfig man page, but basically, you're looking to do a couple of things:"

iwconfig eth1 essid YourSSIDName

If your wireless router isn't encrypted, that should get you associated. If you are using WEP encryption, you also need to add the WEP key

iwconfig eth1 key WEPHexKey

If you're using WPA encryption, you need to investigate how to use wpa_supplicant, which is a separate program.

Once the card is configured, you need to request an IP address:

ifup eth1 (at least I think that works in Suse)

If that is successful, you should see the IP address in the ifconfig output and you should be connected.
You'll have no problem re-configuring for your friends router. I usually roam between 4 different networks and I have a configuration script for each one. I just boot, then run the script I need to connect to that network.

how do i get konsole into root without signing into root?

asside from the fact that i can't edit it outside of root at the moment i am connected and now can't get a dhcp address :( but you are helping greatly and i appreciate it thank you

we are getting somewhere :) now i just have to get a dhcp address

You use the su command to do that. Most people usually use su - (note the -) because that also loads root's environment variables.

I think that Suse uses the ifup script to get an ip address. So once you're in root, try ifup eth1 and see what that does. Alternatives would be dhclient eth1 or dhcpcd eth1. I'm just not sure what dhcp client Suse uses.

If DHCP is giving you fits, you can always try assigning an IP address. There are three things you need to do to get this to work:

1)ifconfig eth1 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx Just replace xxx with the IP address you want to use.
2) route add default gw yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy and replace yyy with the IP address of your router
3) Edit /etc/resolv.conf to include your ISPs nameservers, with one nameserver per line:

nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx And replace xxx with the IP address of the nameserver. Sometimes you can get away with having your router's IP address as the nameserver.

You can open a terminal program such as "konsole" and use the su command. You will need to enter the root password.
What I did is set up my /etc/sudoers file so that I can precede commands with the sudo command to run them as root. The visudo program is used to edit this file, and it has commented examples. You may be able to do what you want by simply removing the comment character (#), and later making yourself a member of the "wheel" group.

You might take a quick look at the output of the command "iwlist eth1 scan". This will scan for Access Points, and if it lists at least one, that is a good sign that the wireless device is working.

After you su to root, you might want to take a look the /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth1 file.
Only root has read access to this file, because it contains the secret keys.

Here is an edited (to remove key info) version of mine:
This is the file that YaST's network interface configuration program produces. Changes made in this file will be reflected in subsequent YaST dialogs. It is always a good idea to run " /sbin/SuSEconfig" as root after editing a configuration file directly. The WIRELESS_WPA_PSK entry should match the routers WPA-PSK key. I used a 64 digit hexadecimal number I generated manually, and cut and pasted it to the routers setup web based interface so that the two numbers would match.
You could use this oneliner to generate a random key:

thanx jschiwal but thats all a bit complicated right now

hangdog42 ok dhcp sent me a ip address but now i can't ping anything in my local network this is starting to anger me greatly :( cause i connected right up to my friends network and out to the internet without touching nething before i don't understand why now that it has a ip and a connection acording to it why it still like this i get nothing but destination host unreachable

also in firefox instead of site unreachable it just sits there like its finding the page but doesn't wanna goto it

That sounds like either the gateway didn't get set or /etc/resolv.conf is empty. Check the output of route -n (and post it if you need to). Also have a look in /etc/resolv.conf and see if there is anything there.

By the way, did you use ifup or one of the other commands to get an IP address?

ok route -n says

Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth1

i don't understand how i have to ips if thats what its saying and why the gateway is assigned without an ip again another table i don't understand i have rebooted and started over completely with all programs ifup,dhclient,and dhcpcd

idk why it deleted all the spaces i hope you can read that

If your router's IP address is 192.168.0.1, then route is fine and that is not the problem.
I have absolutely no idea what you are trying to say here. Let me repeat, USE PUNCUTATION. Take a few minutes and write a proper sentence. Using nothing but run-on words makes your stuff incredibly annoying to read and impossible to decipher.

I am terribly sorry about that I was getting quite tired of linux for one day but am all better now. Anyways.....I am using a windows box as a router for my dial up connection. The way I have it set up it runs exactly like a router. My question is would linux not see that for some reason as apposed to a router and what would be the problem. :( I am over at back at my friends now where I live during the week and the second I recieved a ip address from the linksys router here I had no problems what so ever connecting right out to the internet :(

Since your laptop connects right up to your friends router, it seems likely that the Windows box is doing something funny. So the things to check:

1) That 192.168.0.1 is actually the IP address on the LAN side for your Windows box. If that gateway is set incorrectly, you aren't going anywhere.

2) That /etc/resolv.conf actually has some nameservers in it. That is supposed to be set up by the DHCP process, but it may not be.

3) As jschiwal pointed out, run iwlist eth1 scan to make sure your linux box sees the Windows access point

4)Post the outputs of iwconfig eth1 and ifconfig eth1 and maybe we can spot some problem.