Wireless Not Working

AFI_Flame · 12-24-2008, 05:50 AM

Been playing around with different distros recently. I've been messing with Linux for a while now (mostly Ubuntu but I used to use Slackware a while back) but don't have much experience with Fedora.

I'm running a Toshiba Satellite A135-S4666 laptop I went to System>Administration>Network and it sees my wireless card as:

"Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter"

Ubuntu 8.10 ran it out of the box although it did say it was using a proprietary driver. Do I need to install that driver or what?

n03x3c · 12-24-2008, 09:16 AM

So you now just need to connect to wireless network or first create wireless device and then connect.

And you better give it's control to NetworkManager (that's what I do) and click on its tray icon, and you'll see option, connect to wireless network. Just enter WEP key / WPA details, and ur SSID and get it working.

PTrenholme · 12-24-2008, 10:24 AM

Unfortunately there are no AR242x FOSS drivers that work. What I do is grab the latest madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6 snapshot and run this script as root (with the directory where I unpack the "tar ball" as the argument)

Code:

$ cat /usr/src/wireless/doit
#!/bin/bash
pushd $1
make -s clean
make -s
make -s install
modprobe ath_pci
popd

Note that Atheros has released a driver that you can use if you're not running a 64-bit kernel.

AFI_Flame · 12-24-2008, 11:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by n03x3c

So you now just need to connect to wireless network or first create wireless device and then connect.

And you better give it's control to NetworkManager (that's what I do) and click on its tray icon, and you'll see option, connect to wireless network. Just enter WEP key / WPA details, and ur SSID and get it working.

I did that already... no go. To the other guy, thanks for the input. I may try it later.

AFI_Flame · 12-25-2008, 12:01 AM

I'd also like to add that I put the live CD of fedora 10 in my sister's macbook and it worked flawlessly no configuration necessary so I know it's not my WiFi router messing up.

The weird thing is I've been messing around with the settings and sometimes (randomly it seems) it will detect my network and signal strength and prompt for the WEP code then... nothing.

Also, LAN works flawlessly (using it right now actually)

mickeyboa · 12-25-2008, 11:08 AM

Don't forget that before you compiled the new wireless driver FC10 has already assigned a driver, that driver and the compiled driver are going to conflict.
You have to go to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and blacklist the driver that FC10 had orignally assign.
Also I have a AR242X 802.11abg card in my Asus 702 laptop and it has a FC10 kernel-2.6.27.9-159.fc10.i686, and all the 4.6.27 kernels support that wireless card.

PTrenholme · 12-25-2008, 02:35 PM

I just looked at the spec.s for the processor in the Intel Dual-Core Processor T2080, and it's not a 64-bit processor. So the stock ath5k driver should have worked "out of the box" on a Fedora 10 installation.

So, AFI_Flame, can you tell us why you think it wasn't working? (Basically, open a terminal window and run the command dmesg | grep -i '\(ath\|eth\)', copy the output, and put it in a message surrounded by "code" tags. [A tag is a [, the code, and a ] to start, and the same thing with a / preceding the code to terminate the block. In this case the code is the word "code", which may make the preceding sentence hard to parse.

])

Was the Network Manager icon displayed in at the top of the GNOME screen towards that left-hand side? Did you click on it? Did you right-click on it to see the network status?