wireless lan problems

Hi everyone,
I'm trying to set up a wireless lan in my apartment. For starters, I'm just trying to establish a connection between 2 machines:

1) my laptop running RH9 w/lucent orinoco silver, running orinoco_cs module (vagrant)

2) a RH9 box (turkey) with an EDIMAX EW-7126 pci 802.11b card that came with a linux driver that I compiled and seemed to load with insmod, no problems...

But I can't establish an ssh connection between the 2 machines. I can't even get positive results from pinging.

I tried:
ping 192.168.1.180
from the laptop, no returned packets

and
ping 192.168.1.104
from the box, no returned packets

Here are the results of /sbin/ifconfig and /sbin/netstat -n on both machines.

What am I doing wrong?

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:02:2D:40:80:6D
inet addr:192.168.1.104 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:118 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:105 errors:8 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:22600 (22.0 Kb) TX bytes:15634 (15.2 Kb)
Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:61 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:61 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:6412 (6.2 Kb) TX bytes:6412 (6.2 Kb)

Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth1

-------------------------------------------

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:83 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:83 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:7688 (7.5 Kb) TX bytes:7688 (7.5 Kb)

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:50:FC:F2:370
inet addr:192.168.1.180 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:35 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:449303 (438.7 Kb) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:9 Base address:0xe400

Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 wlan0
169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo

Addendum:

Oh, I should note that both cards have blinking led's (my pci card on my box, turkey, and the orinoco silver on my laptop -- vagrant).

So I think the hardware is initialized properly. The machines are right next to each other now, so it's also not a problem of being too far to get a signal or anything like that.

Well,
I figured it out. The problem was that the driver for my PCI card -- edimax 7126 (using the realtek - rtl8180 chipset) was not properly initialized.

If anyone else is using this setup, try reading everyone's advice at this thread:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/61832

There are 36 pages of posts!!! Eventually some dedicated people got it working.

I will add a couple suggestions for new users: realtek's new rtl8180 v1.4 chipset would not compile properly on my computer. Well, it compiled, but then when I would load it, my machine would hang. I used the older version 1.2 driver found on the edimax website (it is just part of the edimax 7126 software -- it doesn't specify that there are linux drivers included, but if you get the entire .zip file you'll find v1.2 in a subdir called redhat9.0 or something like that). This compiled fine, and with suggested changes to the installation script that I got from reading people's posts on the thread mentioned above, I was able to get it all working (so far w/o WEP, but I think adding WEP won't be tough now that I have it up).

Here's a caveat for anyone considering getting a wifi card w/ the rtl8180 chipset: The only existing driver that I and other people have been able to find has a non-open-source component file that is linked in when you compile. This component only works with 2.4.20
kernels, and must be compiled with gcc 3.2.2 in order to work. Obviously this sucks. It works fine with redhat 9.0 stock since that comes with this default gcc and kernel, but on other distros you'll have to get this kernel & gcc version. Some people reported success in slackware and debian, but they had to use this specific gcc & kernel.

I'm about to switch my machines to debian from RH, and this is what I plan to do.

I read somewhere on the 'net (forgot where) that kernel 2.6 kernels are supposed to come with support for rtl8180, but I don't know if this is confirmed yet.

Because the existing driver has non-open-source components, supporting it will be a big pain in the ***, I'm sure (but I'm just a newbie, not a driver programmer).

cheers,
-Greg