I recently bought an HP Pavillion which came with an internal HP 802.11 b/g Wireless Network Adapter. Windows recognizes it and is able to use it, so there's nothing wrong with the card itself.

Running iwconfig lists:

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

eth1 no wireless extensions.

sit0 no wireless extensions.


eth0 is my firewire port, and eth1 is the wired ethernet.

Any advice in helping me set this network card up in Debian Etch would be greatly appreciated!

To help you get started we're going to need a lot more information. HP Pavilion doesn't tell us much. Is it a Desktop, Laptop? What is the exact model.

The key information is determining what chipset is being used by the internal wireless LAN. If your Documentation tells you that, it would be great. Maybe it will show up on the output of "$ lspci" The easiest way might be to look in the Windows hardware identifying program. I forget the name of it. ... or if you can even figure out exactly what driver Windows is using for the card, that may be helpful.

Please post output of lspci -v to see the specific chipset of the card.

The computer is a customized desktop HP Pavillion d4790y. The debian system architecture is i386, with kernel 2.6.18-3-686 #1 SMP.

When I ran lspci -v, this came up for the wireless card:

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5006X 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
Subsystem: Lite-On Communications Inc Unknown device 5001
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 10
Memory at fdee0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: <access denied>

Thanks for helping me out!!

Atheros cards generally use MadWifi drivers. I have never messed with those drivers, but lots of people use them. I'll tell you what I would do to get started, and hopefully someone will come along to help you with any additional tweaking necessary. I use aptitude from the command line for package management. If you have been using apt-get or Synaptic, you should probably translate these commands to that.

First , you need contrib and non-free in your sources.list file. There should be a line that looks something like this:
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free

# aptitude update
# aptitude install linux-headers-2.6.18-3-686 module-assistant madwifi-doc madwifi-source madwifi-tools
# module-assistant prepare
# m-a a-i madwifi
# modprobe -v madwifi

That should get everything you need to make it work installed on your system. but as I said, There may be additional tweaking required to actually get it working.

Thanks!

I did everything as you said up until the 'modprobe madwifi' line. That didn't work for me, so I searched around, and found this: http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/Distro/Debian/MadWifi

That document told me to use 'modprobe ath_pci', which worked for me...

Any help on how to configure my WEP encryption and using the madwifi drivers would be greatly appreciated!

Actually, when I run dmesg, I get the following results for the wireless card:

ath_hal: module license 'Proprietary' taints kernel.
ath_hal: 0.9.18.0 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, RF5111, RF5112, RF2413, RF5413)
wlan: 0.8.4.2 (0.9.3)
ath_rate_sample: 1.2 (0.9.3)
ath_pci: 0.9.4.5 (0.9.3)
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:02:00.0[A] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 217
wifi%d: unable to attach hardware: 'Hardware self-test failed' (HAL status 14)
ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:02:00.0 disabled

Well, I tried to compile madwifi from source to see if that would help, but now modprobe ath_pci just gives:


WARNING: Error inserting ath_rate_sample (/lib/modules/2.6.18-3-686/net/ath_rate_sample.ko): Unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg)
FATAL: Error inserting ath_pci (/lib/modules/2.6.18-3-686/net/ath_pci.ko): Unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg)