[KLUG Hardware] SuSE 9.1 / Centrino wireless update.

[Bruce Smith]

SuSE 9.1 comes with the beta driver for the builtin centrino wireless
card, automatically recognizes it, and configures it just like any other
supported NIC.  However, I found it doesn't work perfectly.  I've had
problems with it hanging up, where I had to restart networking to get
wireless back online.

The home page for the beta driver is:  http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/
And according to that page:

 "If C3 is enabled, you may occasionally see "Packet Payload Too Large"
 messages in your kernel log, followed by a firmware reset. A temporary 
 work around is to disable the C3 low power state (either via the patch 
 on the website to processor.c or by unloading the ACPI processor 
 module)."

This sounds like my problem, and I tried updating to a later version of
ipw2100 than what comes on SuSE 9.1, and still had the same problem.

I stopped the ACPI daemon on SuSE 9.1, and that _seemed_ to help, but I
didn't run it long enough to say for sure that the problem was really
solved.  Running without acpid means you cannot see the status of the
laptop's battery and the other ACPI functions don't work (which are nice
improvements, but off topic for this message).

In my investigation of this problem, I noticed that SuSE 9.1 also
includes (but does not install or use by default) the Linux NDIS
wrapper network driver.  http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

ndiswrapper is a wrapper for the Windows network drivers.  This is the
driver that I was using on SuSE 9.0 with my Centrino wireless and it
worked extremely well.

So I removed the ipw2100 stuff, configured ndiswrapper, created a new
wireless NIC in YAST2, told it the module was ndiswrapper, and now I'm
up and running wireless using ndiswrapper, and all is well so far.
(again, it's still too early to tell if this works without errors...)

 - BS