Richard's Diary

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Linux wireless

find out what chipset you have (http://pciids.sourceforge.net/)
1. on linux lspci -vvnnm (lsusb shows usb devices)
2. on windows device manager shows pci information and inf file
Decide on strategy
1. Old laptop - Madwifi seemed really complicated with the 2 pieces that fused together to form the API to HAL
2. New laptop - 4315 was not yet supported by the firmware cutter
3. ndiswrapper was the only process which worked for both and seemed easy enough since this time I didn't need to recompile ndiswrapper. But since both laptops had Vista I was unable to leverage the native windows driver
get driver
1. get same 32 or 64 bit XP (Vista drivers do not work with ndiswrapper) driver (inf and sys file)
2. su and place in /tmp/driver and cd to that directory
3. ndiswrapper -i driver.inf (it must be a directory that root can read/write to; ie it won't work with a path to windows partition)
  1. CHECK ls -al /etc/ndiswrapper/* should show something
  2. ndiswrapper -l (ndiswrapper will display something like this:
    <driver-name>: driver installed
    device (xxxx:xxxx) present (alternate driver: <native-driver-name>)
With the driver installed, you must tell your system about it so it can load it
1. modprobe ndiswrapper to load the driver
2. ndiswrapper -m
3. CHECK iwconfig
  1. tail -f /var/log/messages or checking the message logs (with dmesg).

new computer

05:00.0
class 0200 ethernet controller

14E4:4315 REV_01
105B:E003

Broadcom Corporation BCM4310 USB Controller 802.11b/g
Foxconn International, Inc. Device

http://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty_No-Fluff

old computer

05:01.0

class 0200 ethernet controller

168c:001a

168c:2052

atheros ar2413 802.11bg NIC (aka 5005g)

compex wireless 802.11 b/g minipc adapter, rev a1 WLM54G ftp://lizzi555.dyndns.org/Download/WLAN/Atheros/

didn't get to use

hwinfo is helpful

12/20/08 UPDATE
For some reason, the ndiswrapper stopped working so I decided to give madwifi a try and it works now. This seems much easier in retrospect.

install madwifi and madwifi kernel module
add ath_pci to /etc/sysconfig/kernel in MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT section