Thinkpads Forum

i am finding that the Atheros A/B/G II card that i shelled out alot of $$$ for might not be fully linux compatible! it seems to not be able to scan for networks, and the only way i can get it to work is using the cr*ppy Gnome network outlet (that means manually entering the essid and key... every time i reboot...)

anyone else having problems?

i am using ubuntu- are some other distros working?

confused

something is wrong, you should be scanning just fine,
"iwconfig ath0 scan" shows nothing ?

The commands you want to use may be these:

ifconfig ath0 up
iwlist ath0 scan

Notice that the second command begins iwlist, not ifconfig or iwconfig.

The MadWifi drivers for the Atheros chip are still what's politely called a work-in-progress, but you shouldn't have to enter the ESSID by hand during bootup, but you may want to consider adding the ESSID etc to your /etc/network/interfaces file, something like this:

iface ath0 inet static
address 192.168.1.101
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.0
wireless-essid MYWIRELESSESSID
wireless-key 010a4c3c3c

Obvously the wireless key is a made-up example, and so are the addresses, but you get the idea.

Also, if you create a Location for your setup, you probably won't need to bother with the manual setting in the /etc/network/interfaces card, but I can't confirm this.

well, MadWifi been working for me for 2 years without problems, maybe in the beginning only. Having to enter ESSID is not something to be afraid of, I, for one, have to enter MAC of my router, otherwise a no go and haven't tracked the problem.

Before putting stuff into /etc/network/interfaces, its a good idea to test settings first, ifup/ifdown may be hard to debug.

so you would:

iwconfigath0 essid SOME_ESSID mode managed rate auto enc KEY ap any

and assuming your router serves as dhcpd

dhclient ath0
you can also scan for surround area
iwlist ath0 scan

man iwconfig will list you the options you can give and iwlist ath0 scan will provide all you need about AP to connect to.
When it works, follow Edward and put it in interfaces.

i have tried all of the commands above, and have still had no success...

i have been at constant battle with wireless for about 2 months now

Bill,

If you can connect once with the Gnome applet, you should be able to connect all the time by entering the proper info in the interfaces file.

I haven't tried SuSE Linux 9.3, but wireless in 9.2 certainly worked out of the box - roaming wasn't well-supported, but it was possible to get things to work.

Edward Mendelson

Edward Mendelson wrote:Bill,

If you can connect once with the Gnome applet, you should be able to connect all the time by entering the proper info in the interfaces file.

I haven't tried SuSE Linux 9.3, but wireless in 9.2 certainly worked out of the box - roaming wasn't well-supported, but it was possible to get things to work.

Edward Mendelson

it works OK in all the live distros i tried... but ubuntu killed it

it probably just missconfigured it, but without any debugging info its very hard to help you any further.

Have you at least *tried* the technique of entering the data into /etc/network/interfaces? Works perfectly here. And if you've installed the program "resolvconf" (that's the separate downloadable program, NOT the resolv.conf file which is a very different thing), then uninstall it.