opensuse 11.2 serious wireless networking problems

Hi,

I will briefly summarize my saga. The upshot is I think something is broken in opensuse 11.2 at least regarding my wireless card. I am willing to help debug this, but I don’t want to keep putting my system in unusable states…

I’ve used opensuse for a while on an x86-64 box, with a wireless PCI card. I downloaded the 11.2 network install cd. It fails to detect my wireless card. I first installed via a wired connection (which I don’t want to keep using due to how the apartment is setup), then had to disable the wired cnxn to get wireless working. But it worked.

Question 1: why can’t the network install CD use my wireless card? Actually there is WPA/PSK security, so maybe I need to enter that info somehow? But the user isn’t prompted to do this.

OK, just after the new year I ran opensuse updater. At that point the wireless card stopped working. But wired would. After much wasted time, I said screw it, downloaded the full 11.2 install dvd, and ran it. I then got the wireless card working. I forget exactly how.

Then I ran opensuse updater, and as with the first install, the wireless stopped working.

I played some more, and got the system to a state where it freezes shortly after the graphical login screen is displayed.

I booted the install dvd, tried various repair installaion options, to no avail. For more drastic medicine I used the rescue system tool, and deleted various network related things in /etc. When booting, I didn’t get to the graphical login screen. Now I get some messages from wlan0, freezing on:

wlan0 starting wpa_supplicant
wlan0 starting DHCP4 client

I guess I’m not surprised it doesn’t work, in that it doesn’t know the ESSID or wireless password. But shouldn’t it timeout?

Either way, I said screw it again, and am now re-installing.

I will not run opensuse updater until we figure this out, or unless told to do so as part of a debug process.

FWIW the wireless card is a “linsys by cisco”, model WMP110.

I posted this problem earlier in a different forum, got essentially no reply:
11.2 network install CD no can has work - openSUSE Forums

I hope we can sort this out,
Dave Strozzi