Hello!

I have tried various distros on my new laptop but haven't managed to get everything right yet.

- mepis 3.4.3
this uses a 2.6.15 kernel

when booting standard, iwconfig lists the card but my mouse behaves weird because of some kind of bios problem.

when booting with noapic, my mouse behaves ok but ...

iwconfig doesn't list my wireless card at all!

ath_pci, ath_hal and ath_rate_sample are loaded.
lspci shows that it could see the card but it is marked as device unkown.

I tried ndiswrapper instead but it doesn't work either.

kubuntu 5.10 which uses a kernel 2.6.12 did setup my card ok and I could see it with iwconfig
but it was too slow (maybe because it is a 386 kernel instead of 586)


Any suggestions?

any kernel options could give me both a working usb mouse and a working wifi card?
or should I try to speed up ubuntu ?

Thanks!

here is a start and yes there is a module you can load for usb support in the kernel.

here is this and it is a great help on the wifi problem.

http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/FirstTimeHowTo

Thanks for these infos, i will look at it.

One question though: since I could already see ath0 listed by iwconfig when booting without the noapic option, does this mean that the madwifi module (or ndiswrapper) were already able to load and create ath0 (or wlan0) ?

How rebuilding madwifi and creating ath0 would help if it is the kernel option that stops madwifi from loading properly?

Basically
- booting kernel without specific options:
-> madwifi or ndiswrapper works.
-> iwconfig lists my card.
-> usb doesn't work properly.

- booting with noapic option:
-> usb is ok
-> iwconfig doesn't list my card.
-> swapping between madwifi/ndiswrapper doesn't work.

is it not a kernel/hw issue rather than madwifi?

Thanks,