I have openSUSE 10.2 running on an IBM ThinkPad T43 laptop, the wireless interface is an Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG using the ipw2200 driver. The router is a Linksys BEFW11S4 (802.11B) Wireless-B router (with four wired ports).

More often than not, the laptop has problems receiving the IP address from the router, it does not matter if the laptop is two floors up (same home) or if it is sitting right next to the router (less than one foot) and I cannot understand what is happening. I have also tried assigning a static IP address, but the network doesn't come up even using a static IP address, if there is no connection between the router and laptop.

I have looked at the router's wireless settings and have tried changing almost everything (frequencies, channels, etc.), to no avail. A wired connection to this same router works perfectly.

Where the 2915 is 802.11A/B/G and the router is 802.11B (presumably includes 802.11A), could this be the cause of the problem? I've been told that the laptop should receive the IP address in a matter of seconds when it boots up, however because of this problem, I had to edit sysconfig to allow for a four-minute wait for an IP address to be received and on some occasions, this four-minute limit will time out without the laptop receiving the IP address.

I would like to add that I also tried another Linux distro on the laptop, before installing openSUSE and had this same problem with the other distro.

Thank you in advance for any answers and/or suggestions.

I don't think is is the problem.

You might want to do some hardware tests first.

Try booting the laptop using a live cd with wireless support (I think ubuntu 7.04) comes with it.

If the ubuntu distro gives you the same problems then I would start suspecting a hardware issue. The next step will be to figure out if it's the router or the wireless card.

HTH and good luck

I also used Mandriva's live CD while openSUSE was installed. When I tried to configure the wireless interface, it detected the network name immediately and configured the interface, it asked which network to use. Once that was set up, I input the security key used with WPA and was able to get online with it, I have security enabled on the router.