[wplug] Wireless Card in Linux (resolved)

[abhishek soni]

Hello John,

Could you please send this to the wplug list?

So here is how I got my wireless card to work in Linux.
The card is a Netgear WG511T and is a 802.11G card. The first thing is
that this card is based on the Atheros chipset. Luckily there is a Madwifi
project on Sourceforge which makes drivers available for this chipset. I
obtained the related drivers out of cvs:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous at cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/madwifi \
co madwifi

This will create a madwifi directory and you need to do a ./configure, make
and make install. This should compile the drivers ath_pci, ath_hal and
wlan.  Besides this the kernel source and a libdaemon version (> = 0.5) are
also needed. In addition, installing the wireless-tools package helps a
lot.

Next I did a modprobe ath_hal, modprobe ath_pci, and modprobe wlan. At
this point I am not sure if this is required or not but it worked.
An iwconfig should then show the card specific parameters.
Then in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts an ifcfg-ath0 file is required.
The one that I have is a blend from various sources so I am just pasting
it here,

STARTMODE=hotplug
DEVICE=ath0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
WIRELESS=yes
HWADDR="your mac address"
ONBOOT=yes
MODE=Managed
ESSID=any
KEY="your wep key"
MII_NOT_SUPPORTED=yes
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=no
TYPE=Unknown
IPV6INIT=no

After this do a ifup ath0 this should set it working.  Also, I have noticed
that both the ethernet and wireless do not coexist together so you might
want to do a ifdown eth0 before bringing the wireless device up.

Thanks to Alexandros Papadopoulos to explain some of the more archaic
happenings.

Hope all this helps,
Abhishek