I have freshly installed RHEL 5.4 on a Dell Inspiron with WLAN adapter Broadcom 4318. The original driver bcm43xx did not work. So I installed ndiswrapper for using the windows driver.

Now I can connect via DHCP, but when I try to assign a static IP address, it still uses the IP address provided by the router (AVM Fritzbox 7270). I always did ifdown/ifup and the static IP and everything else is present in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1. But ifconfig always shows the IP address assigned by the router. When I switch off the DHCP server of the router I can't connect to the network anymore. The LAN adapter Broadcom 4400 is working well with a static IP address.

Any suggestions or is it a bug of the involved hardware or software?

Network Manager (you can set the service to run automatically) has "edit connections" when you right click on it, and there you can set both LAN and WLAN settings including static IP.

DrLove73:
Thanks for your reply, but it didn't help. Following your advice after 'ifdown eth1' 'ifup eth1' I get the message 'information for eth1... failed; no link present. Check cable'.

Btw: I thought editing the connection with network manager is only the GUI for /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1, but when I change the settings with the GUI, it does not alter the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1. In which other config file(s) are the settings written?

What is weird to me:
I changed back to DHCP (connection was automatically reestablished) and edited connections of network manager a second time. When I now tried to change to manually again and filled in the IP-address, network masque, gateway, DNS-server, the 'apply'-button remained grey, I couldn't save my altered settings.
Reboot (is always good - as I am used to from Windows) did also not help.

To summarize:
I am confused. I tried
1. to alter the network-script /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1
2. to alter the settings with the GUI under system->network (which changed the ifcfg-eth1 file)
3. to alter the settings with the networkmanager in the taskbar (which did work once but insufficiently - only disconnected, but not
reconnected and the changes were not written to ifcfg-eth1).
Nothing worked.

Not a world moving problem as we say in German (excuse my bad English) but annoying to me.

Please post entire ifcfg-eth1 file. I suspect you still have BOOTPROTO=DHCP (or similar) instead of NONE.