nickz327

Hi. I just got this eee for xmas. Im having some trouble getting the wireless card to behave; its an atheros ar5007eg. This is on arch linux. I installed the madwifi drivers (with a small patch in the hal for my card) and am still getting some trouble. I can connect to a network, to the ap, but I get a very very bad bit rate (even after setting the interface to auto with iwconfig). I cant succesfully get dhcp to work. I've been really killing myself over it, as nothing I try seems to work. It would be really great if anyone could identify the problem, and help me fix it.

nickz327

bit of an update: it turns out i have a different wireless card (lspci lied to me). i uninstalled arch and installed ubuntu to try and test the wireless card. it succesfully worked with ndiswrapper. i reinstalled arch and installed ndiswrapper. i loaded up the .inf file, but as soon as i modprobe ndiswrapper, my computer freezes up. i have to do a hard reboot. how can i get ndiswrapper to successfully run on my arch install?

waterhead

You just got it for Christmas, and you are already replacing the operating system??!!

Since this contains new hardware, you may need the newest operating system. I never used Arch Linux, so I can't comment on it's support for wireless.

There is an open source driver that may support your card, called ath5k. It is present in newer kernels, although installing ther latest version is the best thing to do.

Download - Linux Wireless

The ath5k driver is an open source driver. It is developed by the Madwifi people, but it is a different driver. The Madwifi driver is not open source, and not included in the driver link that I posted above.

If you want to use Madwifi, I would suggest getting the latest version using the Madwifi Subversion repository.
UserDocs/GettingMadwifi - madwifi-project.org - Trac

Edit: There seems to be support recently added for this card, in Madwifi. I think that the Subversion driver would have it.
#1192 (Hardware Support: AR5007* (AR2425 chips)) - madwifi-project.org - Trac

As for your problem with NDISwrapper. It can be a useful tool if support for your wireless doesn''t exist. When there is native support for the wireless, installing NDISwrapper just complicates things and makes it much more difficult to get the wireless to work. I usually don't recommend using it unless all other possibilities have been tried and failed.

__________________
Paul

Please do not PM me with requests for help. I will not reply.

waterhead

More info on this.

I have a EeePc 900. When I run this command:
This is how it lists the wireless
If your output is the same, then the ath5k driver supports your wireless. I am using a stock install of Fedora 10, that I installed on a 8GB SD card. The wireless worked "out of the box". I am running the 2.6.27.9 kernel. If Arch doesn't supply a 2.6.27.kernel, you should be able to install the ath5k driver using the compat-wireless driver package the I linked to in my previous post.

__________________
Paul

Please do not PM me with requests for help. I will not reply.

nickz327

ah, that is not the card i have. i have the ar5bxb63. i had to actually open up my eee to make sure. it is not supported by the ath5k drivers. I tried using the latest madwifi-hal drivers before on both ubuntu and arch, but what I found is that it is painstakingly slow. using ndiswrapper i can usually use the internet about twice as fast than using the madwifi-hal drivers. on arch linux when i tried using the madwifi-hal drivers, i would lose my internet connection after about 5 minutes. it seems that using ndiswrapper is the better choice for my card, and i would like to figure out why using ndiswrapper with arch is so problematic.