I’ve just installed opensuse 11.0 on my notebook and I have a lot of troubles with my wifi connection. The card is dlink gwl-g630, revision C2, atheros-based.
First it refused to work with the default ath5k driver. It was detected, but the NetworkManager failed to use it. After googling a lot I decided to install madwifi and it helped.
The NM can now see the card and connect to the AP. It does work for a while, but occasionally (mostly in a few hours) drops the connection without any visible reason. I can use the notebook or just leave it - the connection is lost. It’s not related to power-management (which works fine, BTW), since I turned it off and the notebook is not suspended or hibernated. No traces of any problems in the logs. And I can not bring the interface up using ifup while NM is used. The interface itself is still available but not connected. I have to reboot to get it working.
Ok, I turned the NM off and set up my wifi to use ifup method. I did not have a chance to check if the connection is dropped with this method, but got another problem: it does not want to connect at boot. I checked all the settings in yast many times, I tried both on-boot and hotplug options - nothing helps. The configuration files look fine but not the connection.
The only solution I’ve found was to call ifup from boot.local, but this is definitely just a workaround.
I hope this will be fixed some time. I would prefer to use NM to see the state of my connection, now I can not do this.
BTW, there are other annoying things about NM: I could not configure it not to ask for the keyring password at startup (a well-known problem) and I did not like those popup messages about connection lost/established (another known problem).