I'm trying to get a D-Link DWL--G630 wireless adapter working. I bought it specifically because it was supposed to be supported by the madwifi Atheros modules. This is a cardbus card, and it shows up under lspci:

......
00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 01)
05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5005G 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
root@darkstar:/#

The ath5k and ath9k modules from madwifi do not apply to this chipset.

I downloaded madwifi-0.9.4 from sourceforge, unpacked and read all the included hints. I have checked on all the details that are required - with the exception of knowing whether my kernel was compiled with the same version of gcc that I'm using to compile the madwifi modules. I'm using a precompiled kernel - I think it is the huge.s kernel from the Slackware installation CD.

When I compile (run make in /usr/madwifi-0.9.4/ followed by make install), the *.ko files are installed into /lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/net/ :

root@darkstar:/lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/net# ls -l
total 708
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 210624 2009-01-30 19:34 ath_hal.ko*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 110476 2009-01-30 19:34 ath_pci.ko*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 12730 2009-01-30 19:34 ath_rate_amrr.ko*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 19681 2009-01-30 19:34 ath_rate_minstrel.ko
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 12229 2009-01-30 19:34 ath_rate_onoe.ko*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 18917 2009-01-30 19:34 ath_rate_sample.ko*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 225567 2009-01-30 19:34 wlan.ko*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9661 2009-01-30 19:34 wlan_acl.ko*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 13124 2009-01-30 19:34 wlan_ccmp.ko*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10708 2009-01-30 19:34 wlan_scan_ap.ko*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 19188 2009-01-30 19:34 wlan_scan_sta.ko*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 17867 2009-01-30 19:34 wlan_tkip.ko*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 11787 2009-01-30 19:34 wlan_wep.ko*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6857 2009-01-30 19:34 wlan_xauth.ko*
root@darkstar:/lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/net#


But, just like many others who have posted here, modprobe ath_pci returns an error:

root@darkstar:/lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/net# modprobe ath_pci
FATAL: Module ath_pci not found.
root@darkstar:/lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/net#

Following the suggestion in another thread, I moved the .../net directory to the /lib/modules/2.6.21.5/ instead of /lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/ ... but nothing changed. Still FATAL ...not found.

Can anyone tell me what's going wrong? Better still, can anyone point me to resources so that I can figure out where I went wrong?

Thanks.

y guess is you have Slackware 12.0, as you have a kernel 2.6.21.5.

In such a situation I would make && install madwifi kernel and tools packages using the SlackBuilds provided at slackbuilds.org. If you do that do not forget to read the kernel requirements in the README.

In fact I would first upgrade to Slackware 12.2 but this is out of topic.