From The Legendary Ganz

Hi there I had this problem too. Even though my system is Mandriva Spring 2007.1 you may want to try some of the things here, especially as you are suing an Atheros chip wireless card.

I went out and brought another mini-pci express card to find out if it was the card that was a problem – it wasn’t!

I originally had an Atheros AR5006EX mini-pci express card inside my Samsung R20 Laptop but as I had the same problem as you had: the ath_pci modules loading but no wireless extensions, I brought a gigabyte Wl01GT that had a atheros AR5005GS chip in it, as I had read this worked in forums. The AR5005GS being older than my 6th Generation AR5006EX I thought linux would pick it up, it didn’t at first but I got it to work eventually. This was how I did it…

Downloaded the Madwifi-ng (current) tar and copied into /usr/src directory. I made sure my kernel source of 2.6.22 for my Mandriva OS was also installed in the /usr/src; if you are using this kernel version on a new laptop make sure you enable the SATA parameters in the kernel config when you make menuconfig.

Un-tarred the madwifi source using the tar command (Tar xzvf madwifi-ng...'. You may have to use xjf if its a bz2 tar)and it created a folder called madwifi-ng-r2726-20071006.

I cd into the new madwifi folder using a terminal as root user and typed in the following command:

make KERNELPATH=/usr/src/linux-2.6.22 MODULEPATH=/lib/modules/kernel/net

Make sure you leave a space between make and KERNELPATH, linux-2.6.22 and MODULEPATH.

Then I typed in the following command: make install KERNELPATH=/usr/src/linux-2.6.22 MODULEPATH=/lib/modules/kernel/net

I then typed in modprobe ath_pci then typed in lsmod to check that the modules had loaded. For me they were showing up as: ath_pci, wlan and ath_hal.

I then created a file called ifcfg-ath0 in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts (its where you will find the ifcfg-eth0 that's in a folder called network-scripts (use the find program to find ifcfg-eth0) then save the file as ifcfg-ath0 (in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts folder and edit the contents of the file to make sure you have
device=ath0
bootproto=dhcp
unboot=no
metric=50
DHCP_client=dhclient.

However, even though the modules had loaded when I used iwconfig I was just getting lo no wireless extension, eth0 no wireless extensions. Now having got this result on both the AR5006EX and the AR5005GS atheros mini-cpi express cards in my Samsung R20 I knew it had to be the mini-pci controller on the motherboard that was causing the problem not the card.

After googllng around I found on the Madwifi site that I had to add a patch to one of the ath files in the madwifi folder I had created when un-tarring the source file. Go into the madwifi-ng-r2726-20071006 and into the Ath directory. In the ath folder look for a file called if_ath_pci.c and add the line at the bottom of this list:

{0x0001, 0x001c, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID}, /* Samsung R20 */
{0}

After this I had to go back into the madwifi folder and run “make clean”. I then used the
make KERNELPATH=/usr/src/linux-2.6.22 MODULEPATH=/lib/modules/kernel/net
make install KERNELPATH=/usr/src/linux-2.6.22 MODULEPATH=/lib/modules/kernel/net again and modprobe ath_pci. This time I noticed that the installed modules show up like this:


ath_pci 114920 0
wlan 210992 5 wlan_wep, wlan_scan_sta, ath_rate_sample,ath_pci
ath_hal 234656 3 ath_rate_sample, ath_pci

Don't forget to go into Control center and setup your wireless network.

When you reboot you might find that the ath modules have not loaded, simply do a modprobe ath_pci in a terminal as root to load them.

If you then also type ifconfig -a it will tell you whether the wifi0 and ath0 are "UP BROADCASTING" if they are those interfaces are 'up'.

Now I am able to connect to Aps. Also airodump works. For using airodump I do this: first make sure my atheros modules are installed: modprobe ath_pci. I do all this as root in a terminal. I then type airomon-ng stop ath. I follow this with airomon-ng start wifi0, this will put the atheros card in monitor mode. I then type airodump-ng ath0.

This worked for me but may not work for other systems. Also I noticed that I am getting a stronger wifi signal in Mandriva than in Windows XP (I have windows and the Samsung recovery on partition sada1(hd0,0) & sada2 (hd0,1), Mandriva Spring 2007 on sda5(hd0,4), 6 (swap) and 7(homehd0,6), Backtrack2 on sda4 (hd0,3) and a spare partition on sda8!.

Hope someone finds this helps as this was a problem I had lived with for the last two months!!

After having set everything up in the previous post I went to my local Internet cafe and tried to connect to the Internet. This is something I've been trying to do for the last three months!

The APs showed up in my upper task bar in Gnome (I'm running Mandriva Spring 2007 and compiled kernel 2.6.22).

When you click to connect to the AP on the drop down menu it takes you to the Mandriva Control Center. This next bit always used to confuse me before. In Mandriva you'll get a configuration menu window for the AP you are trying to connect to. I always used to think that Mandriva was getting me to set up a new wireless network as the menu configuration allows you to set things up as ESSID, and lots of other options. All you actually need to do is just type the encryption password (if the AP is secured with one as our Net cafe is, they gave me the password see) and click ok. That's it. A green circular timer icon will appear to be trying to connect and when it does you'll see it change to a network cable icon like this =[|]=. You will also notice that your upper task bar network menu will show you now have an IP address.

I then opened Firefox only to find out my attempts at connecting to Google timed out! Still no Internet!! I suspected it was my iptables ( a firewall) so I typed in a terminal iptable -F (to flush all rules). Also I went into Mandriva's Control Center and security and selected the option to allow everything through the firewall. Finally, I've connected to the Internet!

Needless to say I am now looking at configuring my firewall again.