I just got Slackware 12.2 that apparently has ath5k built into it. I'm having trouble with my wireless network settings. I have an Atheros wireless card. I don't remember which model but it's a commonly supported one. I've gotten it to work just fine in the past. What I am having trouble with is KDE. It won't save my network settings. I enter all the info in and it seems to just forget everything I typed in. I've gotten it to connect and give me internet access twice after playing with it a hundred times but it never stays. As soon as I reboot it just goes away. I've had this issue with multiple Linux distros. I'm convinced that it's a problem with KDE. The information just won't stick. I commonly get it to connect to my wireless router (which is plugged into my modem) but it usually won't give me internet. I've thought about using MadWifi but I don't know how to disable ath5k. Any insight would be appreciated.

Can you get it to work without help of KDE? (i.e. with ifconfig/iwconfig)
Use the output of that command to determine if your card is supported by ath5k using their compatibility website. Mine is an AR242x and neither madwifi or ath5k handle it. I need to get a snapshot of madwifi as the "production" version does not support my card.

If you need to switch to madwifi, you can blacklist the ath5k module by adding the following to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist:I compile my own kernel and just leave it out so you could do that if you're going down that route (blacklisting is just fine if not). Then you can go to www.SlackBuilds.org, search for madwifi (currently there isn't anything labeled 12.2 but you can modify the 12.1 scripts to match up), and get the tools and the driver. If there's a new version of madwifi, you need to use a snapshot as I do, or have any questions about using the Slackbuild process we can help you get up and running.

As far as using KDE to manage your wireless, I would recommend installing the wicd package from extra and following the directions on getting that working instead of using KDE.

Hi,
Your card should be recognized, do a 'ifconfig -a' from the 'cli' to show all recognized devices.

You should be using 'netconfig' from the 'cli' as root to setup your network. If need be you can edit the /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf' as root to setup the network. You would then restart the inet with a '/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 restart'.

Thanks for the info. I did end up manually editing the /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf file and it worked and would load on boot. My only problem now is that it's dramatically slow in Konqueror and Firefox basically won't load. Could just be the ath5k driver. I tried Ubuntu, which still uses the madwifi driver by default, and it was like a speed demon.

Do you use any sort of encryption? Because that is where the Ath5k driver dies on me.

I use a short hex WEP key