[ltp] IBM T40 and WLAN and Suse 9

[Nils Weisensee]

Hi!

I am running Suse 9 on a T40, and I am trying to get Wlan working. Since
I havn't dealt with wlan before, I am not sure if the problems I am
having are actual driver problems, or if the network settings are just
wrong. Oh, I have the standard IBM a/b miniPCI card.

Suse 9 automatically recognized and configured the card as wlan0, and
uses a module called ath_pci. To me, that looks like Suse is using the
madwifi driver with the aethera (?) module... I don't know if that's
correct.

Anyway, when I start KWifi, it says its searching for a network, and I
can change the mode from Ad-hoc to Access Point. Only the "automatic"
setting doesn't work -- I get a corresponding error message when
booting. I already learned that right now, KWifi doesn't detect the
strength of the signal correctly, so I suppose it's normal that KWifi
tells me that the signal is weak and out of reach. KWifi also tells me
the name of the network that I have set on an Apple powerbook, and it
also shows the network name of an Apple access point. KWifi also shows
me an IP that has been assigned to my T40.

The only thing that's missing is the message that the Wlan has actually
been connected. KWifi only says "searching", and although it displays
all the information about the network, it doesn't look like it's
actually connected.

I set the wlan setting to dhcp, the ESSID to "ANY", and left everything
else blank. Setting my ESSID to the same like the network I want to
connect to doesn't help.

Does anybody have a similar configuration, or has enough knowledge about
wlan to tell me what's wrong here? To me, it looks like the driver
works, but obviously some little part is missing.

Any hints?

Thanks a lot!

NilS

PS: Is there a convinient way to manually turn the wifi card on and off?
I would like to save some battery. Oh, one weird thing is that the
Fn-Key combination that turns wifi and bluetooth on and off under
Windows only works on part under Linux. It turns the bluetooth LED on
and off, but it doesn't seem to affect the wifi card. Comments on that?


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