spoonyfork's Journal: Linksys WPC11 v3 wireless NIC working in SuSE 9!

Oh, I'm so happy. I've been dorking with SuSE 9 on some home grown distributed networking crunchers and I decided to see if it would run on my old ass Dell Inspiron 3500 (266mhz, 256mb, 4gb, 13.3") notebook. I had RedHat 8 running on it a couple of years ago but that was before I went wireless.

My wireless NIC is the Linksys WPC11 v3 (802.11b) PC Card. I also have the Linksys wireless broadband router and a Linksys wireless ethernet bridge. I like the Linksys products for home use. They're inexpensive and I haven't had any issues with them.

Installing SuSE 9 on the Inspiron 3500 is a no-brainer. The only thing I had to configure was the resolution for the LCD display. Using the stock kernel, all my hardware was recognized and installed -- including the WPC11. I used YaST to configure the settings on the WPC11 (BSSID, encryption key, etc.) but the wlan0 device never loaded. I checked /var/log/messages and it contained lines from the prism2_cs module that there was a PCI IRQ conflict. WTF, I hadn't seen those since I installed a 56K baud modem on my I586 desktop back in 1995. Alright, I'll play your game. I hit google confident that a legion of geeks have already troubleshot this issue and all I had to do was flip a bit and presto! wireless nirvana.

Some more background... I bought SuSE 9 Personal retail from CompUSA which does not have what appears to be the full kernel source rpm on the CDs (44mb online, 378k on CD3?). This means that the documented solution of enabling CONFIG_ISA in the kernel was not an option without some other networking/downloading/burning/whatever that I didn't feel like doing. Besides, I didn't feel like make xconfig all night trying to get all my options right. I know fully well that this is the right solution and not just because five other people smarter than me said so.. it just is not the one that fits my lazy personality.

Right, more google for some other solution. I read some more that the issue was related to ISA, PCI, and possibly ACPI. The encouraging news was that it wasn't related to the WPC11 device itself. Other people were having the same issue with different wireless NICs. I already decided to skip the ISA route so next I tried disabling ACPI through PCI with the kernel parameter pci=noacpi on boot. This got past some of the ACPI issues and the WPC11 beeped on bootup but still had an IRQ conflict. Close. Next I tried disabling ACPI outright because this old ass notebook isn't going to have any relevant ACPI info anyway. Booting with the kernel parameter acpi=off the notebook loaded the WPC11. I checked /var/log/messages and no IRQ conflicts. ifconfig releaved wlan0 but no IP address. Boo. I double checked the settings in YaST which seemed correct. For grins I decided to use the full hex key value for encryption instead of the string parameter. After a quick save ifconfig showed wlan0 having a DHCP set IP address. Squealing with delight I pinged google.com. Success!

Hey SuSE, thanks for including the nice wlan configuration stuff in YaST but how about either detecting that I need CONFIG_ISA in the kernel because my notebook is so damn old or that ACPI should be disabled because my notebook is so damn old.