can't make madwifi 0.9.3 find my embedded Atheros card
 

ok, i got a Toshiba laptop (Equium, low-end) with an internal Atheros card. it was running Vista when i got it, and the card worked fine, but on switching to Fedora 8 i get no dice. kernel version is 2.6.23.14-107.fc8, i can't get the exact type of Atheros card.

i installed madwifi from source, then from yum, to try and make the card work, but in Network Manager i get this when i try to activate the wifi0 device that madwifi created:

"Device wlan1 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization."

i know the card is definitely present, its little switch is turned on at the side of the machine and it worked fine under Vista. help a noob out guys, i don't wanna try and hack under XP...

L

Does "lspci" show the name and revision of the card? That is going to be important for figuring out what you need to do. If you have the revision you can then check it against the compatibility list.

You might want to try a development version of the driver as well through SVN, as they might have recently added support for it.

Ndiswrapper might be an option if the native drivers are bust, but you definitely want to save that as a last resort.

lspci just gives me "bash: lspci: command not found". there some other command does the same thing, or am i being some sort of moron here?

i did dig up the spec sheet and the wireless card drivers from the Toshiba discontinued models site, though. going through the XP driver i found this version textfile:

2007/09/06 Atheros 802.11a/b/g,b/g Mini-PCI/PCIe Driver v5.3.0.67 for Windows XP

Driver Installer (WinXP) Ver5.2.0.144
WHQL SID = 1258845 Cat Date: 2007/08/01
WinXP Driver Ver5.3.0.67

the driver itself is called ar5211.sys, so i reckon my card is an AR5211, or i'm just stupid. the other driver is the same with a wrapper, i think.

if there's any other info i can get, lemme know. i'm desperate for this thing to work - the reputation of Linux in my department depends on it :eek:

L

You may need to be root to run lspci, I can't remember. But it (lspci) must be there.

madwifi will create an ath0 device in addition to wifi0. This is what you should be looking for.

I do seem to recall that there are some newer Atheros chipsets that madwifi does not support just yet.

lsmod will tell you if the madwifi module is being loaded. To load it, you can try modprobe ath_pci (as root).

ifconfig should list all the network interfaces the system knows about. If you see ath0, you can run iwconfig to get more specific wireless NIC data. (iwconfig requires that wireless-tools be installed).

ok, this is what lspci sees it as:

05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5006EG 802.11 b/g Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

there's more notes on the compatibility list for it, i'm gonna check those out in a second.

this is all the madwifi and wireless shit i can see under lsmod after running modprobe ath_pci a few times (don't think i missed anything):

Module Size Used by
ath_pci 98984 0
wlan 176688 1 ath_pci
ath_hal 234592 1 ath_pci
ath5k 88133 0
mac80211 125265 3 rt2x00usb,rt2x00lib,ath5k
cfg80211 19785 1 mac80211

ifconfig sees eth0, virbr0 and lo (my ethernet jack, something else and the loopback) but nothing else unless virbr0 is my card:

virbr0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:00:00:00:00
<censored mah addresses>
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:37 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:5546 (5.4 KiB)

i'm not sure it is, i've never seen it before and i didn't set it up. thanks for the help, i really appreciate it.

L

I have a a65 toshiba and it has a 5211/12 atheros and F8 picked it up right away. No madwifi,thank goodness, needed.


After a little reading I see that some of the Equium's came with the 5007 atheros which is falsely pickedup as a 5006 in some distros.

You might read into a how to for the 5007 with ndiswrapper.

Er, MadWiFi is the only Linux driver for Atheros cards. So you are using MadWiFi, you just didn't need to manually configure it since your device was automatically detected.

movin
 

rooster, you might be right, buddy - according to the compat list, it's equally likely to be a 5007 masquerading as an 06 through lspci's misreporting. so, i'm trying a weirdass patch it suggested, and if that don't work, i'm gonna open a new question... didn't realise they died so quickly :study:

L

Lepht, you have to run lspci like this This is different from other distros, not sure why. Guess it's a Fedora quirk.

If you do get it running through ndiswrapper... don't think you'll be cracking any WEPs or WPAs. It's near impossible to my understanding.

Regards,

Brandon