[ltp] SUSE 9.2 on a Thinkpad X30

[Jonathan Gennick]

In a fit of temporary insanity, I decided the other day to try and get
SUSE 9.2 working on my Thinkpad X30. The install went amazingly well,
except for one thing: I cannot for the life of me get the wireless to
work.

When I run iwconfig, I see both a wifi0 and a wlan0:

x30:~ # iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

wifi0     IEEE 802.11b  ESSID:"Gennick"  Nickname:"x30"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: 00:30:BD:62:7B:F5
          Bit Rate:11 Mb/s   Sensitivity=1/3
          Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=28/70  Signal level=-66 dBm  Noise level=-94 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

wlan0     IEEE 802.11b  ESSID:"Gennick"  Nickname:"x30"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: 00:30:BD:62:7B:F5
          Bit Rate:11 Mb/s   Sensitivity=1/3
          Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=28/70  Signal level=-66 dBm  Noise level=-94 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

The "Access Point" field in the above report shows the correct, MAC
address for my WAP. It's not clear to me why I see two devices, not
one. A friend who runs Mandrake on a T41 sees only wlan0.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

sit0      no wireless extensions.

Looking more closely at wlan0:

x30:~ # ifconfig wlan0
wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:05:3C:07:21:F8
          inet addr:192.168.0.11  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::205:3cff:fe07:21f8/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1492  Metric:1
          RX packets:229 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:58 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:36322 (35.4 Kb)  TX bytes:16348 (15.9 Kb)
          Interrupt:11 Memory:e0058000-e0059000

You can see here that I've been given an IP address. That's a good
sign, right?

Yet I cannot contact other machines using their domain names:

x30:~ # ping oreilly.com
ping: unknown host oreilly.com

Nor can I contact other machines using their IP addresses:

x30:~ # ping 208.201.239.36
connect: Network is unreachable

I cannot even ping my router:

x30:~ # ping 192.168.0.1
PING 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
[[ctrl-C done in here]]
--- 192.168.0.1 ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 999ms

And I cannot even ping my access point:

x30:~ # ping 192.168.0.4
PING 192.168.0.4 (192.168.0.4) 56(84) bytes of data.
[[again, I had to ctrl-C out of this]]
--- 192.168.0.4 ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 1000ms

I'm at a complete loss here as to what to do next (reinstall
Windows?). Anyone have any advice?

Best regards,

Jonathan Gennick
Editor, O'Reilly Media
906.387.1698   mailto:jgennick@oreilly.com