I have an Orinoco Silver PCMCIA wireless card. On bootup it can do some basic stuff, for example it connects itself to my unsecured neighbour's connection without me doing anything.
It also allows me to set essid and encryption.

But when I run dhcpcd eth1, it hangs. Nothing happens until I kill dhcpcd, at which point the light on the card goes out and I have to reinsert it.
EDIT: It also gives that annoying "operating not supported" for iwlist

I've tried to do my homework about this - Output of loads of the usual cardmgr whatever and lspci stuff is at http://caffeination.net/offsite/lq/
As you'll see from the timestamps on the files (it's a dir list), they've all just been put up there now.

I can't use the card in its current state. Any helps, hints or ideas are very welcome.

Hmmmm you have a good one here... I assume your network is running wep/wpa or something?, unlike your neighbours..

You will find the DHCP client will 'look-like' it hangs if it is unable to obtain an IP address from the network you are trying to connect to (it will time-out after 60 seconds or so though)...
When you kill the dhcpcd process the light on the NIC will turn off as well as it brings the card down after a failed connect attempted 'ifconfig eth1 down'

you should be able to do #cardctl insert (or something similar) and then 'ifconfig eth1 up' to bring it back up again..

i would suggest setting your network to open as well and see if you can connect then. if you can - then try enable each inddividual setting and see where it fails... i.e. turn on wep and try connect again..

Thanks Graz. I can connect to my home net with encryption turned off, so that'll do for now. Thanks for the neat cardctl trick too. It'll add life to my card because I won't have to reinsert it so much any more.

My guess as to the problem I was having is that something in either the driver or the physical card doesn't like encryption. I can live without it for now, though.
EDIT: The fact that it won't let me scan either makes the driver look like a more likely culprit. That and the fact that the card works fine in Windows.

Yep the driver could be the problem.. I know with my ipw2200 card and standard drivers it does not allow scan. if i get the newer drivers i can scan/monitor etc...

Another trick is you can eject the card with the same command #cardctl eject

Also, if you do want to try with encryption on, i would recommend setting the key to 'hex' first on your router... then try #iwconfig eth1 essid <network_name> followed by '#iwconfig eth1 key xxxxxx' followed by #dhcpcd eth1

if you do use a ascii key you need to issue command #iwconfig eth1 key s:xxxxxxxx
(note the s: - this bit tells linux you want to use ascii - common mistake... hehe.. well was for me anyway. Also play around with the settings on your router for 'open/shared' keys... if you have 'shared' on your router then when you issue the command in linux it has to be #iwconfig eth1 key restricted s:xxxxxx <-- i think.

good luck!

* oh one more thing to note. Linux generally support WEP encryption out of the box. In order to use WPA- you need to install and configure something called the WPA Supplicant

I'll just throw this out there since I didn't see it mentioned: I've got an Orinoco Silver on an old laptop as well, and I believe those only do 40(?) bit encryption? Depending on the encryption your router is set to, that might be something to look into...

ahhhh pnellesen, i think your probably nailed it there !!

capicu - try setting your encryption to 64bit on the router and then try again.
you may need to send a command when using the card to say 64bit but i think the wireless tools tries both by default these days anyway.