Newbie with Wireless Adapter

[automan]

yeah, i cant get my ma101 to work either. what exactly did you do to get it working? any help would be appreciated.

[Workaphobia]

Whoops, sorry for not responding before, I guess I missed tortoise's reply.

Let's see... I ditched the GUI configuration utilities because it offered nothing. Right now I'm using the berlios at76c503a driver (http://at76c503a.berlios.de/). After installing that I got wlan0 to appear... I think. To get it to work properly though, I had to download the binary firmware gzip. I stumbled here for a bit before I realized that I didn't run the ./install.sh. By the way, I see that they have updated the firmware since I had this problem initially; I'm only using 1.1.

What stages are you two at? Remember to watch the syslog or dmesg output to see whether it's recognizing the device.

[tortoise]

I have the drivers that come precompiled into mdk10.1 official (which I think are the berlios), and I get the exact same dmesg output that you posted.

I have tried the firmware from thekelleys, and that didn't help, but... I think I know why. The firmware agent never gets called by my hotplug scripts! So, I have been wondering if the stock kernel wasn't compiled with firmware loading enabled .

I have done a little kernel installing in the past, but not much. When you did yours did you have to do anything with the config file? I'm assuming that a config file with the standard configuration was included with the source?

This is my main work machine, so I am really hesitant to do major changes to it's internals.

[Workaphobia]

I attempted to recompile the kernel at some point, which involved going through the menu config utility in the kernel source directory, but I didn't successfully complete the build (I stopped it after two hours and went to bed). I'm using the same kernel that I started out with. Any changes that the installation scripts made took place via modules and not static linking.

When I was at the stage you're at, I tried copying the firmware to a location specified in the readme, but that didn't help. Then I found the script, which copied it to a different location (the correct one) and it all clicked. If it's not loading and you think your system hotswap utilities are configured differently, and you might want to try manually forcing the firmware to download. I'm not sure exactly how to do that, but it was somewhere in the readme.

But if you see the wlan0 in ifconfig -a, you’re at least halfway there. One thing you might want to try is booting into windows (if it’s installed on that box), then rebooting into linux without unplugging the device or shutting down. That should keep the same firmware loaded, although I’m not sure whether its compatible with the at76 driver or only the official atmel one.

[tortoise]

hmm. What you did originally (copying the firmware to the supposedly correct directory) is exactly what I tried awhile ago. Didn't work for me either of course.

After reading your latest reply I tried running the install script and rebooting, but didn't let the comp sit too long before powering-on again. Still no-go, but I will power-down and let the machine have a good long sit tonight and see if wlan0 comes up in the morning.

I'm actually writing this post from the Mandrake machine right now. For a while now I have been booting up into Windows (to load the firmware) and then rebooting into mdk. I must admit, Windows makes a mighty fancy firmware-loader but I don't like all the added stress on the hardware from multiple boots.

EDIT: Oh, also, forgot to mention. I tried the manual firmware loader from thekelleys, but it doesn't work for the usb adapters, it only works for the wireless cards that use the at76c502, 504, and 506 drivers

[tortoise]

Still a no-go this morning.
Pitty.

[Workaphobia]

After reading your latest reply I tried running the install script and rebooting, but didn't let the comp sit too long before powering-on again. Still no-go, but I will power-down and let the machine have a good long sit tonight and see if wlan0 comes up in the morning.

Oh I don't really think powering down the machine had much to do with it suddenly working - if anything it was probably that by restarting, I allowed a critical system process to update itself. I don't see how the actual length of time you leave the computer off could affect something like a driver (although I know that quickly powering off and on may not wipe the firmware and memory entirely).

I'm afraid I don't know any more about this problem - I guess I should consider myself lucky that the hardware gods smiled upon me by chance. Good luck with the adapter.

[tortoise]

Thanks for the input. It's much appreciated.
If I have a break-through I'll post and let folks know.