SuSE wireless card configuration
In this article, I will demonstrate how I was able to get my wireless card working on openSuSE 10.2.
I have the following wireless card:
- Linksys WMP54G 2.0 PCI Adapter
- RaLink RT2500 802.11g Cardbux/mini-PCI (rev 01)
The fresh install of openSuSE 10.2 recognised my wireless card/adapter and configured it "properly" (i.e. it configured it as an rt2500 pci). Unfortunately, it didn't work. That is, using either Yast2 or the command line options (e.g. ifconfig, iwconfig, etc) and DHCP just didn't work.
The following commands all showed the correct module installed, but they don't seem to work:
lsmod # check for rt2500pci (or something similar)
lspci -v # should show the following (or something similar)
Network controller: RaLink RT2500 802.11g Cardbus/mini-PCI (rev 01)
Subsystem: Linksys WMP54G 2.0 PCI Adapter
Flags: bus master, slow devsel, latency 32, IRQ 193
Memory at d5000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2
Fortunately, there is a great website (and project) found here: http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/ that is dedicated to improving the wireless capabilities of these cards/adapters.
Getting it to work
- First, remove the default rt2500 driver from openSuSE 10.2:
modprobe -r rt2500pci # as root
- Prepare your kernel source (you will need to have the kernel source installed first):
cd /usr/src/linux make mrproper
Note: If uname -p yields i686 but no such directory exists, try a ln -s /usr/src/linux/arch/i386 i686; not sure if that is the best solution).
make cloneconfig make modules_prepare
- Download the latest CVS-daily from http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/ and unzip/untar the CVS-daily. Enter the "Module" directory and execute:
make make install # as root
- Check that the card/adapter is configured and recognised:
iwconfig
- If the ra0 or wlan0 shows "no wireless extensions" or nothing), then:
modprobe rt2500
That should do it! Hope that helps someone. Not sure why openSuSE 10.2 shipped with a faulty module/driver.
Please note that you might also have to execute the following:
/etc/init.d/network restart # as root
You might also need to temporarily turn off all firewall related software/daemons (e.g. SuSEfirewall2, AppArmor, etc).
