Hi. On a secondary PC, I used to run Windows, but one day the whole thing sort of crashed without warning. I couldn't reinstall it, but Linux did seem to work; I ended up installing Mandriva One because I had its LiveCD handy. However, while my Linksys WMP54G v4 wireless card worked just fine, a few other things didn't... long story short, I ended up putting SuSE 10.1 on it instead. Since the driver for it apparently isn't installed as it was in Mandriva One, I installed NdisWrapper from the CD and tried it out.
It worked without problem at first. Following online instructions, I set it up in YaST and ndiswrapper -i'd the .inf file. ndiswrapper -l returned "driver installed, hardware present," and modprobe ndiswrapper returned no errors. I could connect with KNetworkManager without any trouble for the first few days.
However, when I turned it on this morning, the KNetworkManager icon in the system tray read "Network Manager is not running" when right-clicked or hovered upon. That seemed kinda weird, so I tried out ifconfig wlan0 up to make sure the interface was working. The output responded cheerfully that wlan0 doesn't exist. KWifiManger couldn't find a wireless interface, either, and re-trying modprobe ndiswrapper did nothing to change it.
Finally, I tried ndiswrapper -l again, and it reported simply "driver installed." WHAT?! No "hardware present"? I'm pretty ticked off, not to mention confused as to why it would suddenly just stop working. The light on the card is still on, so I don't suspect it's an abrupt hardware failure...
Rebooting several times brought much the same results. Occasionally, KWifiManager would detect a wlan0 interface and supposedly connect, but I couldn't go online even though it claimed to be getting a 100% signal. ifup wlan0 likewise gave a coherent response sometimes, but it never did anything beyond attempting to acquire an IP address.
But most of the time, I'm just met with the behavior depicted above. In short, it's as if the wireless card itself was not there. (On a possibly unrelated note, sometimes the little jingle that plays on bootup doesn't, and any sound that's made will play for about a quarter of a second then repeat itself indefinitely.
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So... what are my options? Mandriva One, as I said, had a driver for the card already installed. (For the record, the .inf and .sys files NdisWrapper used are both called rt2500, although lspci shows nothing of the sort, and the interface was called ra0 in Mandriva.) I'm thinking the native driver must be the way to go, since I'm pretty stumped on this whole NdisWrapper issue... but I have no clue where to find it. Would it be on, like, the addon CD or something? And if it is, would I have to reinstall the whole OS? If not, where would I find the driver and how would I install it?
Thanks in advance!
