gateway mx8438 laptop integrated wireless setup question

[treborsitnay]

I am working on a Gateway MX 8738 Laptop (1 GB RAM)running SLES 10.001. It has a Integrated Realtek 802.11b/g Wireless Networking NIC (Realtek 6.1281.130.2007). I can connect with the hardwired NIC to the local router, but not to the 802.11b/g Wi-Fi on the same Linksys router.

What do I need to do? I am a relative newbie to SuSE, some experience with Ubuntu, but nothing strong. But I can follow directions and have over 25 years in IT, networking and communications, so am not totally inept.

Any assistance or suggestions are greatly appreciated

Thanks.

Robert

[reed9]

Howdy. Start here: http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/wir...tart-here.html

[treborsitnay]

Thanks, reed9. I'll take a look at this at my next opportunity - it's a system at my employer's office, and is not always available, but will do ASAP and let you know the results.

By the way, the link below says to post the results "in a new thread". That seems a bit inefficient, as you are already aware of my question/problem. Should I do this anyway?

Robert

[reed9]

No, here is fine. I think they were just saying you can't post in the stickied help thread so start a new one.

[treborsitnay]

reed9,

Here are the results of the lspci, dmesg, lsmod, and uname cmds. (Lines were removed from the dmesg file to fall within linuxforums' filesize limits, leaving the relevant (I believe) lines referencing the Realtek 8738 WLAN chipset + some before and after.)

Thanks for the help.

[reed9]

I'm afraid I'm not very familiar with suse enterprise, or opensuse. I can tell you that support for this card is built into the kernel after 2.6.23, but enterprise distros always run way way behind and you have 2.6.18. The driver module you need is the rtl8187.

What might be easier is in this case is to use ndiswrapper with the windows xp drivers. Novell: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10: ndiswrapper

[treborsitnay]

reed9, that's okay. I just learned a little while ago that the latest Open SuSE release 11.0, Kernel 2.6.27, has native support for the Realtek NIC chipset built in. However, that will all have to wait for sometime for me to work on it, as I have just been handed an extended project in North Carolina, that I have to leave for tomorrow morning.

I will however, try both the ndiswrapper and the latest SuSE when I return.

Thanks again for the help and tips.

Robert

(this thread can be closed - I will try do so after I pack if there is time, or do later this week)