Recently installed Debian on my laptop, but no luck getting wifi card to work.

Tmccoy89 · 12-23-2009, 11:44 AM

I have a belkin F5D8011 ver1000 and i cant seemt to get it to work. I havent really tried anything because i dont know where to begin. Ive tried researching it via google but nothing seems to come up, plus all of the HCLs i have checked for similar distrobutions never seem to tell me much. All help is greatly appreciated.

evo2 · 12-23-2009, 11:54 AM

Since you've not given any details about what you have actually tried, I'm taking a bit of a wild guess here, but it could be that your wireless may need some non-free binary firmware. Debian has packges for these but they are not included with the installer.

http://www.debian.org/releases/stabl...h06s04.html.en

If you can post the out of

Code:

lspci | grep -E 'Ether|Net'

we can find out exactly what the wifi chip is and hopfuly determine if missing firmware is the cause of your problem.

Cheers,

Evo2.

Tmccoy89 · 12-23-2009, 12:03 PM

Code:

thomas@deb-laptop:~$ lspci | grep -E 'Ether|Net'
04:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5416 802.11abgn Wireless PCI Adapter (rev 01)
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5755M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
thomas@deb-laptop:~$

i really havent tried much of anything except attempting to research it and came up empty handed

Tmccoy89 · 12-23-2009, 12:05 PM

Thanks for the quick response by the way.

evo2 · 12-23-2009, 12:22 PM

Ok, as far as I know that wireless chip uses the ath9k driver, and does not need any firmware. First you should check that the module is installed:

Code:

lsmod | grep ath9k

If the above command returns nothing please insert the module into the running kernel using the following command (as root)

Code:

modprobe ath9k

Now please post the output of the following two commands

Code:

/sbin/ifconfig -a
/sbin/iwconfig

Cheers,

Evo2.

Tmccoy89 · 12-23-2009, 12:46 PM

Code:

deb-laptop:/home/thomas# modprobe ath9k
FATAL: Module ath9k not found.
deb-laptop:/home/thomas# /sbin/ifconfig -a
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1c:23:12:b0:1a  
          inet addr:192.168.0.112  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::21c:23ff:fe12:b01a/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:33289 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:13947 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:42838174 (40.8 MiB)  TX bytes:2019666 (1.9 MiB)
          Interrupt:17 

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:12 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:12 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:800 (800.0 B)  TX bytes:800 (800.0 B)

deb-laptop:/home/thomas# /sbin/iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

first command left me with nothing, i also gave the out for modprobe where as it states the package isnt there.

evo2 · 12-23-2009, 12:58 PM

Ok, it seems that kernel that comes with Debian Lenny is too old and does not contain that driver. The good news is that a newer kernel with the driver has been backported to lenny. Please try to follow the instructions on the following page, and report back to let me know how you went.

http://wiki.debian.org/ath9k

Cheers,

Evo2.

Tmccoy89 · 12-23-2009, 11:15 PM

okay im having a problem completeing the steps you mentioned

i added the deb backports repository to the sources.list then attempted the aptitude update command and get an error.

Code:

deb-laptop:/home/thomas# aptitude update
Hit http://ftp.us.debian.org lenny Release.gpg
Ign http://ftp.us.debian.org lenny/main Translation-en_US                       
Hit http://ftp.us.debian.org lenny Release                                      
Hit http://security.debian.org lenny/updates Release.gpg                        
Ign http://security.debian.org lenny/updates/main Translation-en_US             
Ign http://ftp.us.debian.org lenny/main Packages/DiffIndex                      
Hit http://security.debian.org lenny/updates Release                            
Get:1 http://www.backports.org lenny-backports Release.gpg [189B]               
Ign http://www.backports.org lenny-backports/main Translation-en_US             
Ign http://ftp.us.debian.org lenny/main Sources/DiffIndex                       
Hit http://volatile.debian.org lenny/volatile Release.gpg            
Ign http://volatile.debian.org lenny/volatile/main Translation-en_US            
Ign http://security.debian.org lenny/updates/main Packages/DiffIndex            
Hit http://ftp.us.debian.org lenny/main Packages                     
Hit http://www.backports.org lenny-backports Release                 
Err http://www.backports.org lenny-backports Release                            
  
Hit http://ftp.us.debian.org lenny/main Sources                                 
Ign http://security.debian.org lenny/updates/main Sources/DiffIndex  
Hit http://volatile.debian.org lenny/volatile Release                
Hit http://security.debian.org lenny/updates/main Packages          
Get:2 http://www.backports.org lenny-backports Release [56.1kB]
Ign http://volatile.debian.org lenny/volatile/main Packages/DiffIndex         
Hit http://security.debian.org lenny/updates/main Sources                     
Ign http://volatile.debian.org lenny/volatile/main Sources/DiffIndex
Hit http://volatile.debian.org lenny/volatile/main Packages
Hit http://volatile.debian.org lenny/volatile/main Sources
Ign http://www.backports.org lenny-backports Release
Ign http://www.backports.org lenny-backports/main Packages/DiffIndex
Hit http://www.backports.org lenny-backports/main Packages
Fetched 56.3kB in 1s (32.4kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
W: GPG error: http://www.backports.org lenny-backports Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY EA8E8B2116BA136C
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

and when i attempt to run the command that follows

Code:

# aptitude -t lenny-backports install linux-image-2.6.30-bpo.2-$(uname -r | sed 's,.*-,,g') wireless-tools

I get nothing. Feel like im doing something wrong though.

evo2 · 12-24-2009, 01:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tmccoy89

Code:

# aptitude -t lenny-backports install linux-image-2.6.30-bpo.2-$(uname -r | sed 's,.*-,,g') wireless-tools

I get nothing. Feel like im doing something wrong though.

Nothing all? No error message? Anyway the exact name of the linux-image-2.6.30 package might be slightly different. To hunt this down please post the outputs of the following commands:

Code:

uname -r

and

Code:

apt-cache search linux-image-2.6.30

Cheers,

Evo2.

craigevil · 12-24-2009, 01:56 AM

or just use Synaptic and look under "origin" then right click and install the 2.6.30 kernel from the backports.org repo.

While aptitude works great sometimes using Synaptic can make things a bit simpler.

Tmccoy89 · 12-24-2009, 08:47 AM

That did it! im connected thanks for everything sir!

evo2 · 12-24-2009, 09:07 AM

Cool. Enjoy.

Evo2.