WLAN appears to connect then drops out Suse 9.3
 

Hello,
After playing around with live distros for a couple of months I decided to to purchase Suse 9.3 pro and install it on my Acer 2200 notebook. Everything is up and running except my WLAN. I searched the web and various forums for information on WLAN cards and found a very good tutorial on this site for installing hardware using NDISwrapper. I installed that and te driver for my card which I got from Acers website, and when I issue "ndiswrapper -l" it returns something like
inet2220 driver available hardware available
When I issue "ifconfig" or "iwconfig" there is no reference to wlan0; if I issue "modprobe ndiswrapper" and then "ifconfig" or "iwconfig" wlan0 is listed. (I'm sorry if some these commands seem wrong - but I'm new to Linux and I'm having to post this from memory on my Windows partition). Anyway, the output from these commands means very little to me so I searched the web again and decided to install Kwifimanager so that I could get a visual representation of what (might) be going on.
When I launch Kwifimanager after boot-up it says that the device is disconnected. I "SU -" in a terminal and issue "modprobe ndiswrapper" and immediately Kwifimanager shows a connected device with signal strength at ultimate. This is where I'm completely lost; because when I click find network a message box says scan complete, no networks were found but in Kwifimanager the MBit meter goes to full, the ESSID shows the name of my network (which it might be getting from the card configuration in YAST), it shows the MAC address of my router (which I haven't told it so it must be coming from my router) and, on some occassions, assigns an IP address to the card which it must be getting from the router which is DHCP enabled - all looks OK for about 5 seconds untill the meter drops and it loses the above information.
I've tried disabling WEP, switched off firewalls, switched off DHCP at the router and assigned an IP address manually but exactly the same thing happens.
Any pointers in the right direction would be much appreciated and I'm sorry if this is the wrong forum for asking this question but like I said, this is all new to me.

Many thanks
Paul

I got the same problem with Mandriva Linux LE 2005!

I had the same problem with my Acer Travelmate 800 with the built in Intel 2100 11Mb mini-pci card.
Wi-Fi dropping out all the time regardless of the OS... Windows or Linux..

The only thing that kicked the connection back on would be to either reboot, use the hardware wireless disable button to restart the wireless card, or to reset my wireless access point. No software could even access the card after the connection had dropped even though signal strength was still shown as excellent.

After putting up with the problem for months and using a wired connection, I stumbled on the cause of the problem, which requires to boot back into Windows...

With the original Windows build that comes with the laptop there's some Acer software called something like 'Launch Manager' (or something like that I can't remember as I don't have Windows installed any more) on my Travelmate it was accessible in Windows by hitting [Fn]+[F3] (or is it F2?).
In there somewhere there's options for disabling/enabling the Bluetooth & Wireless on bootup, my wireless was set to 'OFF'.
Once the wireless startup setting was changed to 'ON' the problems went away.

I assume that this software changes settings held in the BIOS settings partition on the hdd (shows up as the 'ACER_SERVIC' partition in Linux but is hidden in Windows) causing the BIOS to play silly buggers with the devices while they're running. There is no way of changing this from the actual BIOS only from the Acer software bundled with Windows.

Now i just run SuSE and the wireless connection is super stable.


HTH


Vin

Launch Manager setting
 

Thanks for the reply,
unfortunately launch manager was set to WLAN always on..............still, just for a few moments........

Cheers
Paul

update: Error message on boot
 

I've just looked at the boot.msg file in YAST and found a reference to wlan0, after listing the device it says

wlan0 configuration: wlan -id-00:0e:9b:46:13:3d
<notice>checkproc: /sbin/dhcpcd 5755<notice>checkproc: /sbin/dhcpd 5636
ERROR: command 'iwconfig wlan0 channel 11' returned
Error for wireless request "Set Frequency" (8B04) :
SET failed on device wlan0 : Invalid argument.
wlan0 DHCP already running

Could this have something to do with the Router being wireless B and the wlan being wireless G? I didn't think it mattered, but I'm wondering if I have to tell Linux that the card should operate at 11MBit not 54MBit.

I tried "vi dhcpcd" and got a load of very strange characters so I think I'm probably not supposed to play around in there!