Finally I got my new Netgear WAG511 installed on SuSe 9.0. Here are some tips:

1. Carefully read SuSe’s instructions at http://portal.suse.de/sdb/en/2002/11/wavelan.html.

2. Then, as suggested there, read very carefully ftp://ftp.linux-wlan.org/pub/linux-wlan-ng/README and procede as described.

3. Now you can configure wlan0 with Yast2’s network device GUI.
– Always check /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan0 if STARTMODE is still set to ‘hotplug’. This parameter might be overwritten to be ‘onboot’ by Yast2.

4. I was only able to use my Netgear WGR614 access point only after explicitly specifying the Gateway and DNS addresses for my PCMCIA card, as well as the IP address in Yast2. It did not help to specify them in ifcfg-wlan0, at least not for the Gateway and DNS.

5. After performing any changes, restart the card as root with ‘rcpcmcia restart’. With ‘iwconfig’ you can check if the access point has been found. Try ‘ifconfig’ to see if the correct IP, netmask, broadcast addresses are used. ‘route’ allows you to see if the default gateway is set. If not, type ‘route add default gw x.x.x.x dev wlan0’ which will set the default gateway manually. Configuring it with Yast2 should set the default gateway automatically upon startup or after ‘rcpcmcia restart’.

6. Enjoy your next generation WLAN based on the 802.11g standard with 54Mb/s 🙂

Thanks to Christian Zonsius who helped me getting through the final steps to make it work!