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Can't get wireless to work on T60 - Ubuntu 8.04

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Vic Rosenthal
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Dec 26, 2006 6:23 pm
Location: Fresno CA

Can't get wireless to work on T60 - Ubuntu 8.04

#1 Post by Vic Rosenthal » Sat Apr 26, 2008 7:37 pm

I just installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my T60 (8744-5BU) which has the Atheros AR5418 802.11abgn card installed.

lshw -C network shows the card present, but iwconfig shows no wireless extensions. The LED indicator on the computer does not light up.

I installed ndiswrapper, found the driver in Windows, and installed it. ndiswrapper shows "driver installed, device present". iwconfig still says "no wireless extensions".

But I don't know what to do now! It works in Windows.
Vic

Vic Rosenthal
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Dec 26, 2006 6:23 pm
Location: Fresno CA

Progress, but no success

#2 Post by Vic Rosenthal » Sat Apr 26, 2008 11:18 pm

OK, I realize that I had to do modprobe ndiswrapper to actually load the driver. I did this and I can see the various wireless networks in range. The wirelesss LED lights up and flashes slowly.

However, I can't log on. When I click the little network box on the panel at the top of the screen, I select my network, WPA2 Personal, enter the passphrase...and wait. It tries to connect, but does not succeed.

The access point is a Linksys WAP54G.
Vic

ditkuss
Posts: 12
Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2007 6:37 pm
Location: Napa, CA

#3 Post by ditkuss » Sun Apr 27, 2008 2:15 am

Did you find this link yet? That card also works natively supposedly if you want to try it out.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkPad_ ... ss_Adapter
T23 2647-8NU | 1.13 GHz | 1 GB | 40 GB 5400 | 802.11b/g | Ubuntu 8.04

Vic Rosenthal
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Dec 26, 2006 6:23 pm
Location: Fresno CA

#4 Post by Vic Rosenthal » Sun Apr 27, 2008 1:45 pm

I haven't been able to figure out how to activate madwifi. I installed a package called madwifi-tools which also installed linux-restricted-modules-2.6.24-16-generic. But there must be something I need to do to make it work, because there's no indication of any wireless interface.
The ndiswrapper almost works. It should, since I am dual-booting with Windows and the same driver works under Windows.
Vic

scoot1212
Posts: 48
Joined: Fri Aug 05, 2005 9:08 pm

#5 Post by scoot1212 » Sun Apr 27, 2008 3:18 pm

There is a bug with 8.04 and the intel 3945 card. I haven't found a fix yet but there are a lot of people with the problem. The beta version with kernel 2.6.22 of 8.04 wireless worked just fine but as soon as it went to 2.6.24 wireless broke with the 3945 card. I hope that they get it figured out soon. In the mean time I'm looking at Fedora 9, openSuse 11 and Mandriva.

Scott

Vic Rosenthal
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Dec 26, 2006 6:23 pm
Location: Fresno CA

#6 Post by Vic Rosenthal » Sun Apr 27, 2008 11:30 pm

Well, there may be one with the Atheros card too. I think it has something to do with the network manager, because I can see all the nearby networks -- I just can't log on to a WPA2 encrypted one.
Vic

andrey
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#7 Post by andrey » Wed Apr 30, 2008 6:09 pm

Use madwifi trunk drivers to get wireless to work. You should be able to connect to 'b' and 'g' networks with both WEP and WPA/WPA2 protocol.

Here are the steps to do that:

Official support for the AR5008/AR5418 chipset has not yet been included in an official release of the madwifi-hal however, in the meantime, there is pre-release support with which some have found some success. In order to take advantage of the latest version of the code, you can either download the nightly snapshot, or use subversion as described below:

make (if necessary) and change to a directory where you new directory
user@box:~/$ mkdir madwifi
user@box:~/$ cd madwifi
Fetch files using svn
user@box:~/madwifi$ svn co http://svn.madwifi.org/madwifi/trunk
.
.
.
Checked out revision ####.
Now enter the directory and start compiling:
user@box:~/madwifi$ cd trunk/
user@box:~/madwifi/trunk$ make
.
.
.
With a little luck, you now have a properly compiled driver, ready for install. You'll probably be asked to enter the root password.

user@box:~/madwifi/trunk$ sudo make install

Now all that's missing is probing the module. This will create two new network interfaces "wifi#" and "wlan#"

user@box:~/madwifi/trunk$ sudo modprobe ath_pci

user@box:~/madwifi/trunk$ /sbin/ifconfig

ath0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:19:7E:41:09:C1
inet addr:192.168.0.102 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:316176 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:562494 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:54115716 (51.6 MiB) TX bytes:823180275 (785.0 MiB)
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:15:58:86:70:EE
inet addr:192.168.0.119 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Base address:0x2000 Memory:ee000000-ee020000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:1420 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1420 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:182621 (178.3 KiB) TX bytes:182621 (178.3 KiB)

wifi0 Link encap:UNSPEC HWaddr 00-19-7E-41-09-C1-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:462907 errors:753 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:182
TX packets:563036 errors:6 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:199
RX bytes:91695661 (87.4 MiB) TX bytes:846831037 (807.6 MiB)
Interrupt:21

It's the ath0 interface that you're after for actually configuring whatever network manager you choose to use. The wifi0 is the accursed binary hal interface.

Troubleshooting
If you're having trouble getting the ath0 interface to show up on a regular ifconfig, but can see it if you do an ifconfig -a and nothing seems to be happening with wpa_supplicant, the solution (for some unknown reason) is to rename ath0 to wlan0. This is easily done by modifying the udev rule.

Upon the first probing of the ath_pci module, something resembling the following rule line should have been added /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules:

# PCI device 0x168c:0x0024 (ath_pci)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="<your mac address>", ATTR{type}=="1", NAME="ath0"
All you need to do is change the "ath0" to "wlan0" and you're good to go. Bring down the interface, remove the module with rmmod ath_pci, run the command pkill wpa, remove /var/run/wpa_supplicant/ath0 if it's still there and reprobe the module. Hopefully that should get you working.

Vic Rosenthal
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Dec 26, 2006 6:23 pm
Location: Fresno CA

#8 Post by Vic Rosenthal » Wed Apr 30, 2008 7:02 pm

Before I saw this I downloaded madwifi 0.94 and got it to compile, install, and successfully modprobed it. But it simply didn't work. So I went back to ndiswrapper, which I ultimately did get to work.

However, I am not totally out of the woods -- sometimes I have to manually start it and enter the passphrase. So if I don't solve this, now I have another approach to try!

I am spending more time with this then actually using the system, but I've learned a lot about Linux (which I knew absolutely zero about) in the process.
Vic

Paul Unger
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Location: Solomon Islands / Canada

#9 Post by Paul Unger » Thu May 01, 2008 12:03 am

Can I assume you're using the built-in Network Manager? You might give wicd a try--it works well with my T61 Atheros abgn in a wpa2 environment (not so good in the wep world, however . . .)
X230 2324-HW5 3.3GHz (i5), W7 (64)
T430s 2352-CTO 2.60GHz (i5), W7 (64)
X201 3249-CTO 2.53GHz (i5), W7 (64)
T42 2373-3UU 1.7GHz (PM), XP SP3 / Ubuntu 9.04
T42 2373-4TU 1.7GHz (PM), XP SP3

Vic Rosenthal
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Dec 26, 2006 6:23 pm
Location: Fresno CA

#10 Post by Vic Rosenthal » Thu May 01, 2008 12:43 am

Well, Wicd seems to work. It connected right up. Maybe it will solve my reliability issues. I should say that I appreciate everyone's help. I am hoping that soon I won't need to boot Windows on the Thinkpad anymore.
Vic

Paul Unger
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Senior Member
Posts: 565
Joined: Mon Jun 14, 2004 8:18 am
Location: Solomon Islands / Canada

#11 Post by Paul Unger » Thu May 01, 2008 5:02 am

Wicked! 8) Glad it worked.
X230 2324-HW5 3.3GHz (i5), W7 (64)
T430s 2352-CTO 2.60GHz (i5), W7 (64)
X201 3249-CTO 2.53GHz (i5), W7 (64)
T42 2373-3UU 1.7GHz (PM), XP SP3 / Ubuntu 9.04
T42 2373-4TU 1.7GHz (PM), XP SP3

Shan_VanWagner
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon May 05, 2008 7:23 pm
Location: Seattle, WA

andrey's instructions worked for me

#12 Post by Shan_VanWagner » Mon May 05, 2008 7:43 pm

Andrey's solution worked great for me.

I have a macbook with the following wireless adapter:

shannon@ubuntu-mach:~$ lspci -v |grep Atheros
02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5418 802.11abgn Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

Thanks Andrey!!

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