wireless networking configuration woes
 

Hello,

I'm trying to setup a wireless network on my Slack 14.0 (64-bit) machine (all latest patches applied).

according to lsusb my USB wireless device can be seen:

Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0cf3:9170 Atheros Communications, Inc. AR9170 802.11n

I believe the carl9170 driver should work with this device, cat /proc/modules shows the kernel module to be present:

ath 14755 1 carl9170, Live 0xffffffffa0117000

I have edited my rc.inet1.conf file with appropriate settings for my wireless access point. But iwconfig does not list any wireless interfaces:

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

It seems my wireless card isn't being found at all. Does anyone have any suggestions for things to try to get this working?

Many thanks,
Stu

Does it show up with this?

It looks like the firmware for the carl9170 driver isn't in the kernel firmware git tree... not sure why, since this page says that it's open firmware:

http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/ar9170

You might try grabbing the one-stage firmware from there and dropping it in /lib/firmware to see if that helps your situation.

Actually it seems the firmware is /lib/firmware ! I checked the link from Pat's post to the page containing the firmware (of which there are apparently two versions), the link to one of the two versions is dead, but the other one works and is the same as ar9170-2.fw which I've already got in /lib/firmware. Does the kernel/Slackware automatically detect which version of the firmware to use, or do I need to do something to select one of the versions?

For the record, ifconfig -a merely detects the loopback (lo) and ethernet (eth0) interfaces which are working normally.

Thanks,
S