I’m relatively new to Linux and Suse, so forgive my ignorance. I just installed the latest Suse distro and it was flawless. I installed this on an older toshiba laptop and everything works fine except for one thing. The tosiba laptop has a built in wireless card and I’d like to have the laptop work with a new USB Alfa adapter that I bought. Suse recognizes both wireless cards and i verified with the ifconfig command that they are both able to pull IP’s. However, I’m running into a problem when trying to disable wlan0 (the internal card). I go into the network settings in the GUI to disable wlan0 (realtek_rtl817) and when I do this, it automatically disables wlan1 (pro/wireless 3945agb). I want to be able to keep wlan1 up and wlan0 down, but I can’t seem to get this to work. It’s also interesting that when I physically turn off the internal wireless card by flipping the switch on the laptop, it also turns off the USB conneted adapter as well.
On 03/26/2012 09:56 PM, mattp486 wrote:
>
> I’m relatively new to Linux and Suse, so forgive my ignorance. I just
> installed the latest Suse distro and it was flawless. I installed this
> on an older toshiba laptop and everything works fine except for one
> thing. The tosiba laptop has a built in wireless card and I’d like to
> have the laptop work with a new USB Alfa adapter that I bought. Suse
> recognizes both wireless cards and i verified with the ifconfig command
> that they are both able to pull IP’s. However, I’m running into a
> problem when trying to disable wlan0 (the internal card). I go into the
> network settings in the GUI to disable wlan0 (realtek_rtl817) and when I
> do this, it automatically disables wlan1 (pro/wireless 3945agb). I
> want to be able to keep wlan1 up and wlan0 down, but I can’t seem to get
> this to work. It’s also interesting that when I physically turn off
> the internal wireless card by flipping the switch on the laptop, it also
> turns off the USB conneted adapter as well.
>
> Can anyone help???
Yes. The system is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. Any hard or soft
block should block EVERY wireless device. That is for safety.
I do not know what you are doing, but I frequently have 2 or more wireless
devices configured. I use NM and I let them connect, then disable them from the
KDE applet. If you click on the box with the red X, that interface is stopped.
What you can do is disable wlan0 by unloading its driver by ‘sudo /sbin/modprobe
-rv rtl8187’. As a permanent “fix”, blacklist rtl8187.
Although I haven’t tried in your scenario I believe the documentation I read for the app “rfkill” should do what you want. It doesn’t actually kill anything it allows you to enable/disable individual wireless radios.
Awesome, thanks for the quick response - much appreciated. I’m glad to hear that this is by design and not something that is perhaps screwed up with a config. I’ll try your suggestions out. Thanks a million!!! You saved me probably 5hrs of time digging around on the internet!!
