madwifi/RH Enterprise
 

I recently installed Red Hat Enterprise 4 on my Fujitsu Lifebook 7010D. Kernel 2.6.9-11.EL. I downloaded the madwifi drivers, make, make install, modprobe, etc., no errors. Everything seems to be configured correctly. Problem is, the harware doesn't seem to be recognized. The relevent output from dmesg is:

01:0d.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc.: Unknown device 001b (rev 01)

When the system boots, the ath0 interface claims to be brought up, but ifconfig ath0 up reveals:

ath0: unknown interface: No such device

Any ideas what I might try next?

do you have wireless tools installed? Do you see ath0 if you type "iwconfig" ?

I am not sure what wireless tools you mean. A couple of things were installed along with Red Hat, other than that I have only installed the contents of the madwifi tarball. I do not see ath0 when I enter iwconfig, only lo, eth0 and sit0, all of which have no wireless extensions (naturally).

Another odd, though probably unrelated, thing: there seems to be a problem with my PATH since I installed the driver - I can no longer issue commands such as shutdown (or iwconfig) without giving the /sbin/ as well.

Are there some additional tools I need to get this working?

if you have "iwconfig" then you have wireless tools (it's a package named like this) so it's fine.

I find it very strange that you system bring up Ath0 on boot if it's not recognized by iwconfig then... Is there anything else you can say about that boot message? Like, if it fails then, if you see any warning or "ath0 device not found" or any message of that kind then?
You know, madwifi is very beta, it's nothing you can trust, yet. Maybe it just fails to support your card.


Btw, unles something realy weird happenned your PATH problem shouldn't be related.

This is the pertinent section of my boot log:

Sep 8 13:20:22 naiobi network: Setting network parameters: succeeded
Sep 8 13:20:22 naiobi network: Bringing up loopback interface: succeeded
Sep 8 13:20:22 naiobi network: Bringing up interface ath0: succeeded
Sep 8 13:20:22 naiobi ifup:
Sep 8 13:20:22 naiobi ifup: Determining IP information for eth0...
Sep 8 13:20:27 naiobi NET: /sbin/dhclient-script : updated /etc/resolv.conf
Sep 8 13:20:27 naiobi ifup: done.
Sep 8 13:20:27 naiobi network: Bringing up interface eth0: succeeded

I agree it seems very strange. It's like the driver is installed, the configuration is correct, but there is a disconnect somewhere between the hardware and software.

I realize the driver is still beta, just don't think I have any choice for wireless on this machine. How is the madwifi support for say, Fedora Core 4? I will reinstall if that's the only way to get onlne for now.

madwifi isn't relative to distribution, no driver is. The developpment is just not completed yet. You could try ndiswrapper, it's a way to load windoze driver in linux... it might be a good temp solution.

I know drivers aren't supposed to be distro specific, but this same hardware does work with the madwifi driver on other flavors of Linux. The only other difference I can think of is the kernel release level (or my incompetence ^_^ )

I will take a look for ndiswrapper, and see what I can find, thanks for the suggestion. In the meantime, here is a view of the GUI network tool:

http://linuxchiq.com/RHEL9pix.shtml

ndiswrapper
 

Okay. I installed ndiswrapper, and the 'doze driver for my wireless card. I got the warning regarding 4k stack, and sure enough the machine locked up hard when I tried to modprobe. So I got the kernel patch for 2.6.9, and attempted to patch the kernel. The patch fails when it gets to line 4, with an unknown symbol error. Looking at the code for the patch, this is where it tries to -4KSTACKS. Okay, so I grep the .config file, no mention of 4KSTACKS. No problem, I try to add the line about 16KSTACKS manually, and the kernel compile chokes on that. Double checking the options in the X version of the kernel configuration, there is no mention of stack size.

So, it looks like 2.6.9-11.EL kernel does not have the ability to set stack size? What are my options at this point?