Wireless Networking Help PLEASE!

[theqabalist]

OK so here is the deal. I installed openSUSE 10.2 onto my friend's computer. All is well. The Verizon people come and drop off their stuff for the internet. With it they leave a Westell wireless G usb adapter. Here is where the problem starts. I think, oh this will be easy, I'll just install it like I did mine on my computer. I went through the NDISwrapper method for installing a USB adapter. When i did

ndiswrapper -l.

it says the hardware is present but there is a driver conflict. I check, the card uses the prism2 chipset which is evidently supported under openSUSE 10.2. I was delighted. So i proceeded to undo the ndiswrapper thing. I go into iwconfig, it's recognized. I do the iwlist -scan. I get the network. I do the

iwconfig wlan0 ESSID pxy01 key ***********

This is what I've done before and I expect it to work. It doesn't. I check iwconfig again, it says it's not associated with any ESSID.

Up to this point the status LED on the wireless adapter has not really turned on at all. While the OS has recognized and even utilized it to scan, there has been no status on the LED.

So I decided to try it a different way. I installed KWiFiManager. It seemed to work fine, allowed me to scan, showed me all the networks. But the little button that says connect to selected network is always greyed out. I can scan and see, but I cannot connect to any of the networks.

Now, in the midst of all this, I had been getting hardware recognition problems, I'm assuming from hotplug issues. I would plug it in and it wouldn't recognize it. I would change ports, and maybe it would recognize it. I'm so confused at this point. I can't narrow down possible sources of problems. What I have thought of so far is Driver (which I think is the least possible cause of problems), usb-hardware, usb-kernel related hotplug issues, or the device itself. The setup seemed so seemless that when I hit these oddball complications it frustrated me so much. Does anyone have any ideas? I can provide additional information if necessary. This is an out-of-the-box openSUSE 10.2 installation, no kernel modifications or anything like that.

[ruien]

This conflict is most likely due to installing ndiswrapper from opensuserepo via yast.

Follow this howto to make it work

NDISWRAPPER Setup Information (SuSE 10.x, 32-bit)