Wireless card isn't working

Message

Landus · Post by **Landus** » Sat Nov 17, 2007 9:56 am

I have a Gateway MX6025 laptop. I took out the MiniPCI Broadcom wireless card that came out with it and replaced it with an Atheros AR5212 card years ago.

Recently, I felt like running Gentoo again, so I installed it a few nights ago. Everything is working fine, except my wireless card. I emerged the madwifi-ng package, modprobed the ath_pci module, but there isn't any wifi0 or ath0 interface. Trying to manually bring the interfaces up returns an error.

Code: Select all

mobiletux chris # lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by
ath_pci                75808  0 
wlan                  151748  1 ath_pci
ath_hal               191696  1 ath_pc

Code: Select all

mobiletux chris # ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:E0:B8:94:4B:9A  
          inet addr:192.169.5.106  Bcast:192.169.5.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: 2002:c0a9:514:4:2e0:b8ff:fe94:4b9a/64 Scope:Global
          inet6 addr: fec0::4:2e0:b8ff:fe94:4b9a/64 Scope:Site
          inet6 addr: fe80::2e0:b8ff:fe94:4b9a/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:236 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:153 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:101345 (98.9 Kb)  TX bytes:29567 (28.8 Kb)
          Interrupt:11 

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

Code: Select all

mobiletux chris # iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

sit0      no wireless extensions.

Code: Select all

mobiletux chris # ifconfig wifi0 up
wifi0: unknown interface: No such device

Code: Select all

mobiletux chris # ifconfig ath0 up
ath0: unknown interface: No such device

I've spent the last few days checking various forms and googling trying to find a similar situation that was fixed with no luck. I have all the wireless extensions and crypto API built-in to the kernel. lspci picks up both the MiniPCI bridges and the wireless card. It's almost like the wireless card isn't being detected by the driver.

aqu · Post by **aqu** » Sat Nov 17, 2007 10:53 am

Maybe it's not a best option but you can try to use ndiswrapper and download windows drivers from web.

/BP

Landus · Post by **Landus** » Sat Nov 17, 2007 11:08 am

I've been contemplating that idea, but want to save that as a last resort.

ianw1974 · Post by **ianw1974** » Sat Nov 17, 2007 11:15 am

I always had problems with madwifi, ndiswrapper always worked good for me.

Landus · Post by **Landus** » Sat Nov 17, 2007 1:54 pm

The last time I had Gentoo on my laptop, it was working fine.