help! madwifi, belkin card, nothing works!

I am soooo a newbie.

This is the 3rd time in 2 years I have tried to switch to Linux as my installed os.
I purchased a Belkin f5d7010 wireless card with Atheros chipset. Tried to get it to work on knoppix live cd with ndiswrapper. I could see networks but couldn't connect to them with netcardconfig.

I then read that madwifi works for atheros chipsets, so I decided to hd install knoppix and try madwifi because I couldn't figure out how to do it with the live cd.

I've gone through several forums following the directions for building, installing madwifi and followed the directions, however, nothing goes smoothly. for instance when performing : # make install
it goes through and after a few lines I see something like:

cp: cannot stat 'ath_pci.ko" : no such file or directory
make[1]: *** [install] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory "/root/madwifi-0.9.2.1/ath'

I'm new, but somehow that seems important. I trudge on however, because I've yet to find a screenshot of what make install is supposed to return so I figure maybe that's what is supposed to happen. If not I don't know how to fix it.

moving on I perform # modprobe ath_pci
this returns

WARNING: /etc/modprobe.d/aliases line 159: ignoring bad line starting with "alia"
FATAL: Module ath_pci not found

any help would be great.

BTW: knoppix 5.0.1
kernel 2.6.17
madwifi 9.2.1
thanks

Unless I am mistaking, the Madwifi drivers are installed by default in Knoppix. Are you sure your card is supported by the Madwifi driver ?
http://madwifi.org/wiki/Compatibility#Belkin

I understand it is a f5d7010, but which revision is it ?

When I perform lspci it returns

Atheros Communications, Inc,: Unknown device 001a (rev 01)

Therefore, I am not shure exactly what chipset it has or how to find out

On the back of the card it says version 5100 and I am unable to find on madwifi or ndiswrapper sites this card with this version number, so maybe I should take it back and try a different brand?
Any suggestions?

has anyone had any success with this card? belkin f5d7010 ver. 5100
Atheros chipset

I can find this version number with this model on any of the supported devices pages for ndiswrapper or mad wifi. Maybe it's just new? any thoughts, suggestions?

I am also having Atheros's wifi pci adapter (pci id 168c:011a) .
I am also a newbie to Linux Networking, after lot of googling i found that madwifi work for atheros.
But now the issue is that how to install and detect the madwifi after installation...?
I tried with at tar of madwifi. I installed it and when i am trying : -
[ #] modprobe ath_pci
it shows nothing, simply prompts to command prompt without any messag.

how can i detect weather driver (madwifi) is installed properly or not..?

I don't know that I can solve your problems as I abandoned hope for my card and exchanged it for a linksus card that works with ndiswrapper. If you purchased a new card I might suggest this form of trial and error to you: if you can't get it to work in a short amount of time ( like a day or two ) and you just purchased it, take it back and exchange it for a different model. It took me 5 times exchanging cards, but I had my current card working in less than 5 minutes. If you can't take it back or haven't lost hope yet, all I can offer ( as I too am new to Linux ) is I believe that if you typed: # modprobe ath_pci and nothing happened, that is a good thing. If it didn't work you would have gotten messages informing you of failure. The next step I would perform is # iwconfig
if you now see a device like ath0 or ath1 then it worked. You should also see some new device by doing ifconfig . . .I think. If you don't you might try # ifconfig ath0 up This is where I had problems though, I could see the card, I could scan for routers ( # iwlist ath0 scanning ) and could see them, but I could never manage to connect to them. I could never get IP addresses. I think there is a command like dhcpcd or something but I couldn't get it to work. Sorry I can't help more, good luck!

Quote:

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I tried with at tar of madwifi. I installed it and when i am trying : -
[ #] modprobe ath_pci
it shows nothing, simply prompts to command prompt without any messag.

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Linux terminals are very untalkative. Since it didn't say anything it means that you successfully loaded the ath_pci module.

Your next step is to type iwconfig to see what the name of your device is.

Then type

Code:

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iwconfig devicename essid "ESSID"

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replacing "ESSID" with your essid

And if you are connecting to a network with wep,

Code:

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iwconfig devicename key (key)

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replacing (key) with the wep key.

Then just use dhcp to get an ip address

Quote:

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dhclient devicename

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by the way, your device name will be something like ath0