This card has worked fine for me with the madwifi drivers and the 2.6.7 kernel. http://www.tuxroxx.net/index.php?pag...1T_How-To.html

Having tried everything to get this card working, madwifi, ndiswrapper, kernel rebuilds you name it I tried it. I must have reinstalled at least 10 times. Finally for no apparent reason I reinstalled one last time, followed the excellent instructions from vincent and the two lights flashed together instead of one at a time. This man is my new hero!

Dave

Dude I love you.

I'm glad this review is helping people!

Worked great. Had no problems, execlent instructions there. My suggestion also, would be to put the following lines in a bootscript:

ifconfig ath0 IP_ADDRESS
route add default gw GATEWAY

money

btw I use these to boot up wireless on startup. I borrowed them from somewhere on the 'net, and I thought you guys may find it useful

http://www.euralia.co.uk/linux/rc.wireless

this replaces the rc.wireless in /etc/rc.d

http://www.euralia.co.uk/linux/rc.M

place the contents of this file in the rc.M file AFTER the card has been initialised.

Dave

With Knoppix 3.6, there are a few extra hacks that you've got to go through to get this card to work, I've found.

You've got to go into the program file for netcardconfig and modify the code as follows:


There's a line that says as follows:

NETDEVICES="$(cat /proc/net/dev | awk -F: 'eth.:|tr.:|wlan.:/(print $1)')

It needs to read:

NETDEVICES="$(cat /proc/net/dev | awk -F:'eth.:|tr.:|wlan.:|ath.:/(print $1)')

That will allow it to detect Atheros chips and use the madwifi driver.

Then, you go in to the terminal and type:

$ sudo ifconfig ath0 up

Then, if you're like me and just want to use the terminal to get your IP number via DHCP:

$ sudo apt-get install dhcp, dhcp-dns, dhclient

$ sudo dhclient ath0

You may need to check your wireless access point if there are multiple routers by using "$ sudo iwlist ath0 scanning".

The card works fine... But I am unable to use airsnort to discover AP.

I always get the error message : Error. Could not set monitor mode.

airsnot-0.2.4-0 (Dag's repo)
madwifi-0.9.3 (ATrpms' repo)

Did one of you guys was able use that soft to scan/discover AP?
And how did you proceed?

No problems at all, just plug and go.

Even easlier than the windows install, that required me to insert the CD.

Hello, i tried to install madwifi and found that it didn't quite work with insmod/modprobe until i looked in dmesg and found this:

wlan: version magic '2.6.7 486 gcc-3.4' should be '2.6.7 486 gcc-3.3'
ath_rate_onoe: version magic '2.6.7 486 gcc-3.4' should be '2.6.7 486 gcc-3.3'
ath_pci: version magic '2.6.7 486 gcc-3.4' should be '2.6.7 486 gcc-3.3'
ath_hal: version magic '2.6.7 486 gcc-3.4' should be '2.6.7 486 gcc-3.3'

Exactly how should I go about getting around this?

This product seems to be 100 percent compatible with linux NOW ... but when I first purchased it I couldn't get the bloody thing to work. I needed the use of this product more THEN than I do now. A huge thank you for helping me get this thing working!

Anyway ... my office has an acer travelmate 250 and the pcmcia card is a netgear wg511t. The flavor of GNU/Linux is Fedora Core 2.

After reading this post I first updated all software on the system using "yum update". This process updated a bunch of software and also the kernel. I rebooted and placed the pcmcia card in the slot. I then went to:
http://download.atrpms.net/production/packages/fedora-2-i386/atrpms/

... and installed these four rpms from that site:
ltmodem-kmdl-2.6.9-1.11_FC2-8.31a8-7.rhfc2.at.i686.rpm
kernel-module-madwifi-2.6.9-1.6_FC2-0.9.4.11-13.rhfc2.at.i686.rpm
madwifi-0.9.4.12-14.rhfc2.at.i386.rpm
madwifi-kmdl-2.6.9-1.11_FC2-0.9.4.12-14.rhfc2.at.i686.rpm

I had to use the above site because I couldn't find madwifi rpms anywhere else.

I rebooted the machine and I could tell immediately that things were going to work because both lights on the pcmcia card were flashing together AND that the machine didn't hang during boot with the pcmcia card in the slot! Before it always hung during the pcmcia module load if the pcmcia card was firmly placed in the slot.

I did an "lsmod" which showed that the macine now had the "ath_" modules installed:
ath_pci 52388 0
ath_rate_onoe 7560 1 ath_pci
wlan 98780 4 wlan_wep,ath_pci,ath_rate_onoe
ath_hal 132304 2 ath_pci

On the desktop, I opened up the network configurator ...
"Start Here" --> "System Settings" --> "Network" ... I clicked on the "New" icon --> selected "Wireless Network" and amazingly saw that my pcmcia wireless card was in the list on the next screen (before it had not been there). I was then able to configure my wireless network successfully.

Thanks to all you who posted your comments ... it really helped me get this thing working. I'm on the wireless encrypted network now posting this reply! Thanks :-)

-- Tony

I followed the link given by Irish Rover step-by-step and my card was up and running in no time. Thanks for the tip.

In Fedora Core 3, I would recommend using Network Manager with this card--that is actually the reason I got this card--my previous card (Orinoco circa 2002) was not compatible with Network Manager. Nework Manager has some nice features to help auto-detect and make wireless netowrk configuration via a GUI versus command line much easier. If you network hop like I do, this is a nice advance.

Thank you very much!!! I got this card working in about 10 min after reading this post.

Works great!

It took me about 2 nights to get it to work, but I have to say, I'm kinda still a newbie with Linux. But it's in these occasions that I learn a little more...
No frills, no kinks... Just install madwifi, you're good to go with WEP... Need WPA, install wpa_supplicant, and surf away :)

I did not run into any big troubles, just simple things I didn't know before...

Be careful if you intend to use this card with wpa_supplicant and a Linksys WRT54G router with the Alchemy or Satori firmware from Sveasoft. I had to flash back the factory firmware to get it to work... Your mileage may vary though... Hope Sveasoft fixes the problem soon...

But now, it works... And I recommend :)

Have fun guys :)

Works well with Kismet and Airsnort. If it isn't working, try this:

1. Did you build your kernel with CONFIG_NET_WIRELESS and wireless extensions? Most stock kernels do not come with this enabled. Also, make sure PCMCIA card support and the modules required for your socket (probably yenta_socket) are enabled in the kernel.

2. Do you have the kernel source installed? This is a requirement to rebuild your kernel and to build madwifi.

3. Are you running Vincent's instructions exactly?

4. If you can't get an IP address, are you using the latest version of dhclient and/or dhcpcd? Get it here: isc.org/sw/dhcp/dhcp-v2.php

All in all, a very good card and a good choice with Linux. Gets excellent range (beats my friend's 2x more expensive 3com card).

100% compatibility. Stock kernel, stock everything, worked out of the box, just needed to configure with yast and started working right away. Just be sure to tell SuSE to configure it as soon as you get to the desktop. If chose the wrong option, or cancelled it, then turn off your computer, take out the card, reboot, then shutdown and put back in the card so it will recognize it again as a new piece of hardware. Again 100% compatibility! Worth every dollar!

Nice card, well supported. Here in The Netherlands, we can use 13 channels, so I added the string "options ath_pci countrycode=528" to /etc/modprobe.conf because the default is just 11 channels. The madwifi page explains what countrycodes are and where to look them up. Using the new madwifi-ng code is a bit of a tricky affair at the moment, but there are also guides for that on the madwifi homepage. There is just one problem: mixed turbo mode is still not supported according to the information on the madwifi page. I don't use turbo mode, mixed or otherwise, but that's beside the point. Madwifi apparantly still does not fully support all the functions the card provides, thus I rate the card an 8 for use with GNU/Linux: very good, but not (yet) excellent.

Netgear WG511T ver 1 with Atheros 5212 chipset. Installed in an older (ca. 1999) Dell Inspiron 7500 w/ Celeron 466MHz cpu. What a pain! Mostly, I think,due to the age of the laptop. I tried like heck to get it to install w/ madwifi and couldn't do it after weeks of trying. Gave up and switched to ndiswrapper (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Main_page) and had incomplete success (open networks only; no authentication) w/in 1 night.

The problem was/is Yenta. At boot time, Yenta was disabling my IRQ 11, but giving a msg in the system log that it had been re-routed and shared, leading me to believe it was working. In the process of working with ndiswrapper I came across a reference to IRQ problems. I read the kernel docs (kernel-parameters.txt) and found the command line additions I needed and modified the /boot/grub/grub.conf file to add them to the kernel boot command. I also disabled my serial and parallel ports to free up their interrupts. Voila - no IRQ disabling. From that point on, ndiswrapper worked very smoothly. BTW, the Dell offered no BIOS support for specifying IRQs, which would have helped immensely.

I then got wpa_supplicant from http://hostap.epitest.fi/wpa_supplicant/ and followed the instructions in their doc file to make and install wpa_supplicant. It didn't work at first because the windows drivers for the version 1 WG511T card don't support WPA; only WEP. I downloaded new drivers from netgear and, following those instructions, I believe I updated the firmware on the WG511T (they never really said; just "insert card now" - yet another reason I dislike windoze), on my wife's windows laptop. I then had to remove, recompile with the new drivers, and reinstall ndiswrapper and wpa_supplicant on my laptop. Now works perfectly using 128-bit WPA-TKIP encryption.

If your laptop's old, the card's a freebie and you have a desire to learn Linux then the WG511T is a good choice. It is probably also a good choice if you have a newer computer, based on the comments of a pretty large number of people. I did get madwifi to work on maybe 4 occasions out of hundreds (thousands?) of attempts, but it would never work on the next boot. I suspect now that it was the IRQ problem all along.

The WG511T works superbly, finally. I get 54Mb speeds routinely (can't do 108 yet, though) and connections are more reliable than my wife's newer laptop with built-in Intel Pro chips and drivers.

Good luck!

After a few days of research and whatnot, I found several reviews on how well this card "just works" with SUSE 10.0. It has an Atheros chipset, which was recommended to me by the SUSE folks in Germany. I was literally able to just plug this card in and have the system recognize it, and ask me if I wanted to configure it, which went very smoothly. If you want something that will just work when you plug it in, this card is a very safe bet.

Worked out of box with Kubuntu. I must say that the Ubuntu distro has increased my expectations for Linux hardware support from "it's a pain to get working with wireless, if it ever works at all" to "it works with most cards, and can be configured with a few clicks". Kudos to Ubuntu!

Faultless using madwifi SUSE 10.0 RPM