wireless card not working - via technologies

**olacelle** · 07-29-2009

Thanks reed9 the 'modprobe ndiswrapper' will be my next step. I should manage to get it loaded on boot.

Thanks waterhead!
I'm not sure what ath_pci is. Could it have something to do with Atheros cards? I'm just guessing but I know that I installed everything that had to do with wireless when I did my iMedia install.

I didn't include lsusb because I thought it was irrelevant in this case. I don't have another wireless card installed. The only other thing there is is an onboard ethernet card.

I think I also got my hand on that driver source you mentionned and as I said I wasn't able to run make on neither my iMedia or CentOS installs. iMedia didn't have make and something in the Makefile was pointing to something that wasn't there on my CentOS install.

If the modprobe ndiswrapper doesn't work I'll probably try to do as you said and get the necessary things installed on my iMedia system to compile the driver. Unfortunatly I can't do any work on it at the moment but I'll try to post back before end of day.

Thanks again.

Olivier.

**olacelle** · 07-29-2009

Seems like modprobe didn't help. lspci still says

Code:

00:0c.0 Network controller [0280]: VIA Technologies, Inc. Unknown device [1106:3253]

Am I making a mistake by relying on this message to see if the card is working?

It also seemed like the ndiswrapper module was already loading on boot because I could see it when I did a 'modprobe -l'.

I guess I'll move on to try and compile the driver on linux again.

**reed9** · 07-29-2009

You are mistaken in relying on that message to see if the card is working.

You should probably rely on whether you get an ip address and can ping a host on the web.

As Waterhead mentioned, and I missed, in your lsmod output, you did show ndiswrapper as loading. You also had the ath_pci and ath_hal modules loading, which is a little weird if you don't have an Atheros card. I would remove those modules and blacklist them. It's possible they're conflicting with ndiswrapper.

Also, I would try out, after making sure the module is loaded with ndiswrapper (ndiswrapper -l), I would throw in a

Code:

/sbin/depmod -a
/sbin/ndiswrapper -m

**waterhead** · 07-29-2009

There are some other ndiswrapper options that you should run, as they could be helpful. To see a list of options, use the --help option:

Code:

ndiswrapper --help

You would then get this output:

Code:

paul@eeepc:~$ ndiswrapper --help
install/manage Windows drivers for ndiswrapper

usage: ndiswrapper OPTION
-i inffile       install driver described by 'inffile'
-a devid driver  use installed 'driver' for 'devid' (dangerous)
-r driver        remove 'driver'
-l               list installed drivers
-m               write configuration for modprobe
-ma              write module alias configuration for all devices
-mi              write module install configuration for all devices
-v               report version information

where 'devid' is either PCIID or USBID of the form XXXX:XXXX,
as reported by 'lspci -n' or 'lsusb' for the card

I suggest also running the -ma and -mi options too.

**olacelle** · 07-30-2009

Ok I did what you said here are the results:

Code:

rmmod ath_pci
rmmod ath_hal

ndiswrapper -l
vnwl : driver installed
             device (1106:3253) present

/sbin/depmod -a  --> no output generated

/sbin/ndiswrapper -m
adding "alias wlan0 ndiswrapper" to /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper ...

ndiswrapper -ma
module configuration information is stored in /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper

ndiswrapper -mi
same output as previous command

Now I need to configure the card to work with my network here which is also going to be a new challenge for me!

Can I remove ath_pci permanently? It comes back after I reboot. I guess I could include 'rmmod ath_pci' to one of the startup scripts.

Thanks again

**reed9** · 07-30-2009

Wait, I couldn't quite tell. You got it working with ndiswrapper?

Can I remove ath_pci permanently? It comes back after I reboot. I guess I could include 'rmmod ath_pci' to one of the startup scripts.

Look in the directory /etc/modprobe.d/, and you will likely already find a file named blacklist.conf, or something along those lines. Add the lines

Code:

blacklist ath_pci
blacklist ath_hal

If there is no such file, you can create one.

**olacelle** · 07-30-2009

No I didn't mean I got it working. Unless I can connect to my access point I guess I will not know.

The blacklist file was there, I added the 2 lines as you wrote at the end of the file but they still showed up after reboot.

**olacelle** · 07-31-2009

I need to configure my pc to use a WPA2 network. There's already an access point ready for it. Assuming my wireless card is physically working, where shoud I start?

**waterhead** · 07-31-2009

The easiest way is to use some sort of network connection manager. I don't know if your distro has anything to offer, but I recommend using Wicd.

wicd - home

**olacelle** · 07-31-2009

Unfortunatly the iMedia distro really doesn't have a lot of graphic tools, and I didn't find anything that looked like a network manager.

On the other hand a collegue and I have been playing with ifconfig, iwconfig and wpa_supplicant and we can see from the access point log that an attempt to connect is happening but fails during authentication. When I have more details I'll post back. I'll also have a look at Wicd see what it can do for me.

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