suse 9.3 professional on dell latitude d610

[anyweb]

hi, getting wireless to work was a pain,

 

it identified the Intel 2200bg card just fine but yast was no help in setting up wireless. Finally after much trying, and some googling i discovered that there was a message in /var/log/messages which read

 

Kill Switch must be turned off for wireless networking to work

which is great, at least now i can see why i wasted hours trying to get wireless to work. so some more googling explains the following:- 

[/url][url=http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=suse-amd64...69505013930&w=2]http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=suse-amd64...69505013930&w=2

 

Code:

cat /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ipw2200/0000\:03\:03.0/rf_kill

 

will return a value, explained below...

 

so on a Latitude D610, if you cycle through FN+F2 the value reported by the code above will give a number corresponding to below. You need a '0' (zero) to get wireless working.

 

0 = RF kill not enabled (radio on)

1 = SW based RF kill active (radio off)

2 = HW based RF kill active (radio off)

3 = Both HW and SW RF kill active (radio off)

 

to quickly get this info i made a simple bash script which tells me what the state is when run,

 

simply fire up vi and paste this in

 

Code:

#!/bin/sh

cat /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ipw2200/0000\:03\:03.0/rf_kill

 

then chmod +x wireless_state

 

(or whatever you called the file).

 

sh wireless_state will then return a value. once you get it working iwconfig will hopefully look like this

 

eth0      IEEE 802.11b  ESSID:"wireless"  Nickname:"linux"          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: 00:05:5D:99:CF:4D

          Bit Rate=11 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm

          RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off

          Encryption key:1111-2233-44 Security mode:open

          Power Management:off

          Link Quality=70/100  Signal level=-58 dBm  Noise level=-85 dBm

          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0

          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

 

cheers

 

anyweb

[kabifff]

Holyyyyyyyyyyy crap Anyweb, I have a latitude D610 and I've been digging for this for months. You, sir, are the man.

[kabifff]

.....But I still can't get it to work. VIM won't let me past anything into it, and if I can get it to, it says "pattern not found: sys". Frustrating.

[anyweb]

to use vi try the following:

 

to INSERT text press 'i' or the INSERT key on your keyboard

to REPLACE text press the INSERT key again

 

to save your changes (write) press the ESCape key followed by : and then 'w'

 

ie:

 

Code:

:w

 

to quit

 

Code:

:q

 

to save and then quit

 

Code:

:wq

 

pressing ESC will go from 'INSERT/REPLACE' mode to interactive mode allowing you to enter commands

 

good luck

 

cheers

anyweb

[kabifff]

Does this work even if I don't have the centrino chipset, but just the pentium m?

[anyweb]

centrino is not a chipset, its a marketing term from intel to denote that there is an intel wireless card in your laptop (along with an intel cpu)

 

so if your latitude has an intel wireless card in it then at boot time, you'll see a 'centrino' logo on the bios screen

 

if however, your latitude has a broadcom wireless card then you'll just see 'pentium M' on the same dell bios screen

 

so are you sure that you have an intel card in this or not ?

 

lspci will show you what card you have, post it here

 

cheers

anyweb

[kabifff]

centrino is not a chipset, its a marketing term from intel to denote that there is an intel wireless card in your laptop (along with an intel cpu) 

so if your latitude has an intel wireless card in it then at boot time, you'll see a 'centrino' logo on the bios screen

 

if however, your latitude has a broadcom wireless card then you'll just see 'pentium M' on the same dell bios screen

 

so are you sure that you have an intel card in this or not ?

 

lspci will show you what card you have, post it here

 

cheers

anyweb

 

Hey anyweb, sorry about the delay. What is LSPCI? I know I don't have an intel wireless card, I believe it's a broadcom by origin, but it has the dell label on it. It's a dell 1470 wireless A/G card.

[anyweb]

well if you have the broadcom card then you'll need to use ndiswrapper to get it to work,

 

checkout the ndiswrapper howto in the wireless section of linux-noob.com for more details

 

and in linux, commands are case sensitive, so its not LSPCI its lspci (all lowercase)

 

cheers

anyweb