Laptop Wireless issues

[Keyphur]

I recently made the switch to linux, running Slackware 12.1, and I've been pretty comfortable with it other than the wireless
My comp is a Toshiba Satellite A215-S4757 and uses Atheros AR242x 802.11abg

I've read that this chipset is supported by Madwifi, but after countless tries I got nothing.I also tried Ndiswrapper but again, nothing

Also, for some reason the wireless did work with Ubuntu Eee, but I would much prefer to get it running on Slackware

I'm a bit of newbie, as I am sure you can tell, so I am asking for any info or advice on how to get it running

I'm sorry if I have not posted enough info, I will try and find out more if need be

[waterhead]

I have this wireless in my Eee Pc 900. It is now supported by the ath5k driver. This driver is in newer kernels, and nothing else needs to be installed.

I installed Fedora 10, and it worked out-of-the-box. I also use NetworkManager to connect to wireless networks. Here is the kernel version that I have:

2.6.27.7-134.fc10.i686

The driver can be installed as part of the Linux Wireless compat-wireless-2.6 package.

Download - Linux Wireless

If you must use the Madwifi driver, you will need to compile the Subversion version.

I understand that NetworkManager is not available for Slackware. That is a shame, as it makes connecting to wireless networks very easy. I would not use Slackware for wireless because of this. NetworkManager is available in Fedora, Suse and Ubuntu, and I'm sure others too.

[Keyphur]

Victory!

thx waterhead, the ath5k driver seemed to have worked without a problem, now I just have to figure out how to connect to a network
Im going to stick with Slackware tho simply because I'm trying to learn as much as I can about Linux and doing things the easy way would only hinder that

[waterhead]

You may need some help from someone with Slackware experience.

There are two things that you should install. There is a wireless-tools package, that provides many of the terminal commands for wireless. And then there is wpa_supplicant, for connecting to WPA encrypted connections.

The names of these may be slightly different in Slackware.

[Freston]

It's not very diffcult to run wireless on Slackware without any form of network manager. You just need to know how.

There are some automagic approaches possible, look in the /etc/rc.d directory for that. But I never completely figured it out that way, to be tell you the truth. Connecting manually is so much easier. And a script is just a `vim` away

# Bring up the interface 1)
ifconfig wlan0 up

# optionally, just checking whether you can see your access point
iwlist scan 

# Asociate 2) with an Access Point
iwconfig wlan0 essid $YOUR_ESSID

# Request IP address, gateway and nameserver
dhcpcd wlan0

If this works, then you can enable encryption and use iwconfig to add your key to the process.





1) It may be that your interface name isn't wlan0, it might be ath0. You can check with

ifconfig -a

2) Sorry, no spelling checker installed on this browser

[vonbiber]

Basically I agree with the first post (Freston), except that it needs a
few corrections

#this one is ok
# Bring up the interface 1)
ifconfig wlan0 up

#this one is wrong. I wrote below the correct command
# optionally, just checking whether you can see your access point
iwlist scan
#corrected
iwlist wlan0 scanning

# Asociate 2) with an Access Point
iwconfig wlan0 essid $YOUR_ESSID

# Request IP address, gateway and nameserver
dhcpcd wlan0

[reed9]

#this one is wrong. I wrote below the correct command
# optionally, just checking whether you can see your access point
iwlist scan
#corrected
iwlist wlan0 scanning

Both scan and scanning work for me. However, if you use WPA encryption on your wireless network, which you should, since WEP is weak, this method won't work, you'd need to configure wpa_supplicant.

[waterhead]

I have since found that you can install Wicd in Slackware, and use that. It uses wpa_supplicant for WPA connections.

wicd - home