Thinkpads Forum

I spent all last night trying to get the Atheros wireless set up under Mandrake 10 -- to little avail. I started by using the prepackaged madwifi_* packages on the distro, but didn't get far. In fact, I kept getting a situation where any action that required root permissions took forever to complete (like sudo). So I scrapped those drivers, went to the madwifi site and downloaded the latest CVS version. Compiled fine, as per the README. Installed the modules using modprobe, and the light went on for the wifi. I used the wlconfig and associated programs to get the wireless set up for my network, including 128-bit shared key encryption. But no matter what I do, I can't see anything on the network. I can ping the interface just fine (static IP), but can't see out. I've got the settings for DNS et al just like the settings for eth0, but... nothing.

Does anybody have some configuration files that they can share with me? Specifically the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg.ath0 and any entries in rc.local, modules.conf, etc?

Thanks,

John

By commenting out the lines for the WEP settings (I was using 128bit HEX with Shared Key), and turning off WEP on the AP, I now have great connectivity. Better than Windows, actually. Under Windows my connectivity is spotty at best. I have been connected without incident for about four hours now. I would very much like to turn the WEP back on, though. So the new issue is: what forms of WEP are supported with the Atheros driver, and how are they set?

I have no experience with Mandrake, but in Fedora Core and Gentoo, you do something like this:

iwconfig eth1 key key-as-hex

or

iwconfig eth1 key s:key-as-a-string

where eth1 is my wireless.