We have a German exchange student for a fortnight. Nice, quiet, polite creature, who is taking full advantage of technology to avoid England, and speaking English. She spends a couple of hours a day IMing, in German, her friends at home; and most of the rest of the time here in her room if she has to be in our house at all. She does not read books, in any language, which must make this house a little strange since she is sleeping in the only room (except the shower) that does not have a bookshelf in it. That’s because it’s too small.
What it does, normally, have is the backup computer, plugged into an ethernet cable, and running linux where the fan won’t disturb anyone. That is now in this office, switched off, becasue the fan disturbs me. I want it in the cellar, where there is a power point and perfectly good wifi reception. So I bought a wifi card, and put it in. At this point I am perfectly stuck. The card works in windows, and is recognised and correctly by Suse 9.1. But, like our exchange student, it lurks all silent, talking to the router outside, and not to the box in which it finds itself.
I am completely at a loss, because everything you can google assumes a kind of basic understanding that I have not got. I can’t discover how you tell it that such and such a card corresponds to such and such an interface. How does it know that the main network card is eth0? Why won’t it recognise the wireless card as wlan0?
It’s a long shot but if there is any reader to whom these questions make sense, would they make themselves known? It’s Suse Linux 9.1 and a dlink 520+ card.
I do know that in the last resort I can take it down to the cellar, plug everything in, boot it into windows, get everything working, and then unplug the keyboard and monitor. That might give me backups. But I wouldn’t have remote access.
The mapping of /dev files to devices is standardised: see “here”:http://www.lanana.org/docs/device-list/, for example.
Does it mention it during boot up?
Does /etc/init.d/network start/stop say anything about it?
Have you prodded the relevant bit of yast2?
Does /etc/sysconfig/network/ say anything about it?
Having Googled, I suspect you need “these drivers”:http://acx100.sourceforge.net/.
it sounds like a driver problem to me. you could try popping in a knoppix cd, and just seeing if it works. but that card seems, upon some google inspection to be non-trivial. let me kick danny and see what he comes up with.
Ok. Hang on. I was out all day yesterday, and will be again today,. so I won’t actually poke around until the weekend. But first, some clarity, I think. Is it true that I need to do three things?
1) Have the card physically recognised as soething sitting on the PCI bus (this happens)
2) Identify, find, and install the right drivers.
2b) these will automatically make an interface appear
3) waste another morning sodding around with the networking scripts so that the new interface works.
If those are the necessary steps, then I’ve done (3) before with other cards, and (1) appears to have been accomplished already. So it is a driver problem of some sort. What sort, I don’t know, since the relevant drivers are supposed to have been downloaded and installed.
As for Des’s specific questions — there are some grumpy bits of demsg; I don’t knwo what the relevant bits of yast2 are, outside the bit where it is detected, correctly, as a network card; /etc/sysconfig/network seems untroubled by the existence of a new card.
windows and vnc. You know it makes sense.
R
vnc down a remote connection? Really? And could I run it as it were headless? I don’t want to have a keyboard and monitor attached.
Providing your PC will boot headlessly, then yes. VNC (on XP at least) is a service that wakes up before user login, so you can reboot remotely and get back in. I use VNC and Filezilla on my main PC for all my remote access and file transfer requirements, mapping the VNC service to a low unused port to prevent it standing out too much to the swarms. Means that if someone has to get or send me a file too big for email, I can pop in from anywhere on the planet, set up a quick account for them and email them a link to paste into Explorer to drag and drop the file.
R
ah well, too late. I doubt the PC would boot headless; I don’t have XP; and I got the wireless card working. Finally. In the end, I had to find the drivers, and there were two sets that sort of worked. I had to install, no more than three times each; and modify the boot scripts so that they stayed installed. I probably had to disable the ethernet port as well, but that’s quite easy.
So I am not going to experiment with your solution, though I am grateful to know about it. Every coupel of years I feel that I ought to understand linux a bit, just to see how it is getting on. It does get slowly better. But it’s still odd to come on a huge hole in the documentation like that. I’m told that with a different card it would have been much easier. But the router is lovely, and has a proper, configurable hardware firewall.
Wow – for someone who writes for a living you sure don’t type so well.
I’m sure Darwin’s garden had its rough patches too.
How are the online etiquette lessons going, by the way? Early days yet, I know, but are you seeing much improvement?
R