Thinkpads Forum

Are there any known issues getting wireless networking in Fedora 10 working on a T40 ? I can see the router but never get a working connection. I have tried on two networks, Be Unlimited router using WPA, and Linksys using WEP.

Is your wireless card associating at all with the AP's?

While trying to connect to a network, type in a terminal "/sbin/iwconfig"* and see if you can see it associated with the network. You should be able to see a MAC/Physical address of the AP you are trying to connect to if you are associating correctly.

Also, what wireless card are you using?

You can find that out in "/sbin/lspci"* from a terminal, looking for something that starts off with "Network Controller"



* - In Fedora 10 /sbin is part of the regular user's PATH variable, and thus you can just use "iwconfig" or "lspci" to get the output you need.

OS is patched up-to-date, kernel version is 2.6.27.21-170.2.56.fc10.i686

The neworking drop-down menu shows a number of wireless networks including my own. The "Wireless Network Authentication Required" dialog box pops up after a while, prompting for a network key (this is shown correctly set from a previous attempt to connect). This dialog correctly automatically detects and sets WPA and WEP for the two networks I have tried in this dialog. Re-entering the key just results in the same dialog appearing after a while.

lspci :
02:02.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5211 802.11ab NIC (rev 01)

iwconfig :
wlan0 IEEE 802.11ab ESSID:<my router ssid>
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.452 GHz Access Point: <my router mac address>
Bit Rate=11 Mb/s Tx-Power=23 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2352 B
Power Management:off
Link Quality=75/100 Signal level:-49 dBm Noise level=-97 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

SSID and MAC address were correct.

I turned wireless security off in the router as an experiment and was able to connect wirelessly. I guess that proves the wireless card is functional under linux, but for some reason it doesn't work with security on, which seems odd. Do I need to install a different driver, e.g. what's suggested here,
http://www.fedoraguide.info/index.php?t ... ge#Madwifi
I was expecting this to just work out of the box ...

amardeep wrote:OS is patched up-to-date, kernel version is 2.6.27.21-170.2.56.fc10.i686

The neworking drop-down menu shows a number of wireless networks including my own. The "Wireless Network Authentication Required" dialog box pops up after a while, prompting for a network key (this is shown correctly set from a previous attempt to connect). This dialog correctly automatically detects and sets WPA and WEP for the two networks I have tried in this dialog. Re-entering the key just results in the same dialog appearing after a while.

lspci :
02:02.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5211 802.11ab NIC (rev 01)

iwconfig :
wlan0 IEEE 802.11ab ESSID:<my ssid shown here correctly>
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.452 GHz Access Point: 00:16:B6:06:A1:22
Bit Rate=11 Mb/s Tx-Power=23 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2352 B
Power Management:off
Link Quality=75/100 Signal level:-49 dBm Noise level=-97 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

I turned wireless security off in the router as an experiment and was able to connect wirelessly. I'm not exactly sure what that proves, except that the wireless card is functional under linux. Do I need to install a different driver, e.g. what's suggested here,
http://www.fedoraguide.info/index.php?t ... ge#Madwifi
I was expecting this to just work out of the box ...

Madwifi would work pretty well, but ath5k is catching up real fast and will be passing soon.

I would download the latest wireless tarball from here:

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/ath5k

and follow their instructions for building a new wireless driver. This one will be more up to date, but may contain some testing features. Another option(Which is what I do currently for ath9k, the N version of that driver) is to download a 2.6.29 kernel which contains a whole list of wireless improvements over the 2.6.27 from koji.

This may seem like a challenge, but it's not that bad actually.

You'll want to download 4 packages from here:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buil ... ldID=96454

http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packa ... 0.i686.rpm
http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packa ... 0.i686.rpm
http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packa ... 0.i386.rpm
http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packa ... noarch.rpm

Download all those into a directory, then from a terminal prompt you'll want to cd to that directory...i.e. and install the RPM's And then reboot.

The 2.6.29 kernel has maaaaaaaaaaany many benefits, and these kernels on the koji project are built by RH employees for Fedora 10.

Thanks for the tips, I wussed out and went the conservative route and just installed madwifi. I'm sure those tips will come in handy at some point though, for example I didn' t know about koji.

Wireless is now working with the Linksys (haven't been in the vicinity of the Be Unlimited router yet, but I'm guessing it'll be fine too). When I turned wireless security back on for the Linksys I swapped it to WPA, so that's the set-up I'm currently using.

Since wireless now works it's worth my while fiddling with all the other settings to try to get comfortable with the desktop etc. Some general remarks on first impressions :

* I just swapped from Gnome to KDE as the Gnome file manager was annoying me. I used KDE about five years ago when I last had a linux install and was quite happy with it (of course it has totally changed since then, and I believe is currently undergoing major updates).

* Not entirely sure that the graphics driver is top-notch. Window drag seems a bit stuttery at first movement, and painting seems a touch laggy. I'll put up with it, the Fedora guide mentions installing drivers for various graphics cards but my ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 isn't one of them, so I guess I go with what's already there.

* The current main annoyance is the trackpoint. I want my middle button plus trackpoint scroll back ! Pretty much can't live without it. Searching for relevant topics seems to turn up a bunch of stuff, so that's next on the list Can't we just have a Thinkpad trackpoint rpm that magically sorts it out

This is what I have in my xorg.conf file for trackpoint scrolling in Mandriva.

How did you get Fedora 10 to scan for wireless networks?

I tried my T41 with a Fedora 10 LiveCD but I couldn't get F10 to 'locate/see' the wireless networks.

I have Fedora 10 on my desktop and it works fine with a usb wireless adapter. I also have other (Debian-based) distros on the same desktop which I am more familiar with but I liked Fedora 10 with KDE.

I was wondering if it's my Broadcom wireless card (BCM4318 chipset). I would like something that works 'out of the box' but I will settle if it's not too complicated of a configuration.

How did you get Fedora 10 to scan for wireless networks?

Booted up, logged-in, and clicked on the network icon on the desktop toolbar. It listed the visible networks, and I picked my network. Didn't do anything special.