Wireless Saga
Jonathan Hutchins
hutchins at tarcanfel.org
Thu Apr 29 11:45:54 CDT 2004
It looks like you're making some progress, and learning the value of checking
the Linux Hardware Database or looking for drivers BEFORE you buy hardware.
You didn't mention your distribution or version, which could make a big
difference. A lot of progress has been made in the last year toward getting
the wireless laptop cards to load (and unload) smoothly.
One of the problems is that these cards are actually PCI cards, and the
original PCMCIA hotplug scripts didn't handle them correctly. Mandrake 9 had
definite problems with the scripts not matching up with each other, and with
detected hardware triggering only part of the loading process.
I run an ACX100 card (SMC2435W) and have to compile the driver for each kernel
update, but SuSE installs the kernel sources for me with each update. In
order to successfully stop the card when the laptop goes into "sleep" mode, I
shut down /etc/init.d/network, then pcmcia, then hotplug. Starting these in
revers order will bring the card back up when the laptop comes out of
"sleep".
These are all just scripts, and if I were to dig into what scripts SuSE is
running when "sleep" mode is triggered, I could probably fix them to do
what's needed in the right order rather than having to do it manually, but
I've been too lazy to bother.
You may find that if you look into the above scripts you can find something
that helps. You may also need to check with iwconfig to make sure that you
are setting the right mode on the card so that it is compatible with your
WAP. While Windows often uses successful defaults, Linux requires a little
more active configuration.
For SuSE, the wireless parameters are set
in /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan-pcmcia. I think Mandrake puts it
in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.
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