Hey, I recently installed Red Hat 9 on a 1.5 GHz P4 with 128 megs of ram. In my system I have a D-Link DWL-G520 wireless ethernet card, which previously worked on my windows installation. I found the madwifi driver for it, and then downloaded and installed the drivers on my linux machine. My problem is that after I have it installed, I don't know how to get it working.

In fact, I'm not even sure if the driver has contacted the hardware. And if it hasn't, I don't know how to connect the driver with my card.

I'm a newb, if that helps.

Thanks...

Some more info...

in /etc/sysconfig/networking

[root@localhost networking]# modprobe wlan
[root@localhost networking]# modprobe ath_hal
Warning: loading /lib/modules/2.4.20-8/net/ath_hal.o will taing the kernel: non-GPL license - Proprietary
See http://www.tux.org/lkml/#export-tainted for information about tainted modules
Modules ath_hal loaded, with warnings
[root@localhost networking]# modprobe ath_pci
[root@localhost networking]#

...

[root@localhost root]# lspci -v
blah blah blah...

02:0a.0 Ethernet controller: Unknown device 168c:0013 (rev 01)
Subsystem: D-Link System Inc: Unknown device 3203
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 168, IRQ 10
Memory at f2000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2

blah blah blah...
[root@localhost root]#

[root@localhost root]# iwconfig ath0
ath0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:""
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412GHz Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Bit Rate: 0kb/s Tx-Powerff Sensibility=0/3
Retryff RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
[root@localhost root]#


[root@localhost root]# dmesg
Linux version 2.4.20-8 (bhcompile@porky.devel.redhat.com) (gcc version 3.2.2 20030222 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.2-5)) #1 Thu Mar 13 17:54:28 EST 2003

blah blah blah...

wlan: 0.7.1.1 BETA (Sam Leffler <sam@errno.com>)
ath_hal: 0.9.5.3 BETA (Sam Leffler <sam@errno.com>)
ath_pci: 0.8.3.2 BETA (Sam Leffler <sam@errno.com>)
PCI: Enabling device 02:0a.0 (0014 -> 0016)
PCI: Assigned IRQ 10 for device 02:0a.0
divert: allocating divert_blk for ath0
ath0: 11b rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps
ath0: 11g rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps 6Mbps 9Mbps 12Mbps 18Mbps 24Mbps 36Mbps 48Mbps 54Mbps
ath0: 802.11 address: 00:80:c8:1E:42:b0
ath0: Atheros 5212: mem=0xf2000000, irq=10
[root@localhost root]#


[root@localhost root]# ifup ath0

/sbin/ifup: configuration for ath0 not found.
Usage: ifup <device name>

[root@localhost root]#


Hope somebody can help!

Thank you.

Well the driver is certainly loaded, and it modprobed too! I've got to remember that as I keep recommending forced insmod'ing and that's evidently uneccessary. Good post with all the info!

This driver has a lot of the BSD wireless netstack in it so its just a matter of getting the settings right, and a little bit of a specific order, if these work, we'll sort out how to automate bring up next.

ifconfig ath0 up
iwconfig ath0 mode managed
iwconfig ath0 essid nameofnetwork
iwconfig ath0 enc 21321312321

Then look at iwconfig by itself again and see if you've gotten associated with an access point, there will be a real MAC address there instead of that 00:00:00:00:00:00 one. If so, fire up dhclient:

dhclient ath0

Cheers,

Finegan

Finegan,
Thank you so much for the tips! It seems that the only thing that I was missing was
dhclient ath0
which saved the day. Right now I'm surfing! WUHOOO!

By the way, how can you automate this on startup?

Thanks,
theli0nheart

Run the RH network interface GUI and enter your wireless parameters (from the command line, run "neat" as root) or edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ath0 (eth0 on my system, so guessing on the last bit).

Like 2Gnu said... except since the driver creates a non-standard device name, you'll have to create the ifcfg-ath0 file... if you simply copy the -eth0 file and name it ifcfg-ath0, that'll do the trick. The RH GUI is perfectly capable of applying settings to this device correctly, its just got a name that it isn't looking for.

Cheers,

Finegan