[PLUG] Installing a Cisco Valet wireless USB adapter

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 14:10, Mark Jones <mark.sinanju at gmail.com> wrote:

> So, I ditched the Cisco Valet and ordered a D-Link DWA-160 wireless
> USB adaptor. Just received it from the UPS guy. According to the linux
> drivers page (http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Devices/USB), it
> should work for me using the ar9170 driver. Simply plugging it in
> accomplished nothing, so I don't know what to do now.

well, we'll need some qualification on the "nothing".  i'm assuming
you mean "the internet didn't magically start flowing into the
laptop", and if that's the case and you did nothing besides plug it
in, there are probably some steps to take before we even start
troubleshooting problems--it needs to get set up first!

but let's see if the system sees it.  after you unplug and replug it
(waiting a minute or so between to be safe), and then run the command
'dmesg' in a terminal and see if the last few lines talk about finding
a device and using the ar9170 driver.  you might go so far as to post
the related lines here for our edification.

if you see some mention of that driver without anything terrifying
(like a kernel panic), then we can go on to the next step:

it's been awhile since i ran suse, but it looks from a cursory google
as though 11.3 (i know, you're on 11.2) uses network manager, so i
guess that'd be a good place to start.  if there isn't a little
network icon somewhere in one of your panels (the bars at the
top/bottom/sides that also probably have a clock and other little
things in them), you might try just running nm-connection-editor from
the command line.  it's pretty intuitive.

if the wireless tab is empty, you might still have to use yast (suse's
old system config tool) to tell the OS to make the device available to
network manager and company.  i think you actually want to run yast2,
and there should be a networking tab in there that you can poke around
in.

if that isn't fruitful, perhaps there is some documentation you could
refer to?  i googled quickly for 'add network device opensuse' and
didn't see anything obvious (that wasn't written in 1999), but i bet
there are docs installed even on your system that address how to do
this so people who don't run your OS aren't trying to guess so much =)

luck++;

> According to the page for the driver, it should be included in my
> distribution already (Linux 2.6.31.14-0.4-default i68). Is that right?

it's impossible to tell from just that number.  a kernel can be
compiled with or without support for many things.  it seems likely
support is already there, though.