Howto Uninstall Madwifi From Madwifi+ndiswrapper

Hi
In Suse 10.1 I installed madwifi and ndiswrapper. So the wireless card stopped working because of two drivers. I uninstalled the madwifi rpm and that didn't fix the second-driver issue. I tried blacklisting madwifi but couldn't work out or get adequate advice on what to blacklist. So I threw up my hands and reinstalled 10.1 as the line of least resistance.

Now in 10.3 I have madwifi installed but it doesn't cut the mustard with my wireless card since the latest kernel upgrade outstripped the version in the openSUSE madwifi repository. It's gone strange.

So I plan to uninstall madwifi and install ndiswrapper. But if I do I will run into the old problem of two drivers.

So can you tell me please how to completely block madwifi in order to give ndiswrapper a fair go?

Thanks
Swerdna

I have seen that blacklisting the ath_pci module is standard practice, but one would think there would be a cleaner method to remove the modules and edit any scripts which might be trying to load the drivers at boot. Some questions (that may or may not be helpful): Are you getting any associated modules still being loaded? Is there any dmesg output suggesting ath_pci and ath_hal are still being associated with your wireless hardware? Are there any network udev rules, that possibly need to be removed?

Thanks Dean. I'll let u know what happens.

Swerdna

(...)
Now in 10.3 I have madwifi installed but it doesn't cut the mustard with my wireless card since the latest kernel upgrade outstripped the version in the openSUSE madwifi repository.
(...)
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Being that I'm relatively new to Linux... what do you mean by that? I have 10.3, I keep my system updated and I use madwifi which works (or... does it? ).

Being that I'm relatively new to Linux... what do you mean by that? I have 10.3, I keep my system updated and I use madwifi which works (or... does it? ).
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You should stay with madwifi. The performance loss that I spoke about is assuredly temporary. I also have a tendency to imagine things a bit worse than they really are. What happened was that I was forced to reinstall 10.3 because I'm constantly trying new things on/in it and one of them screwed the installation. During the reinstall I switched from ndiswrapper to madwifi just for interest.

It seems to me that the performance of madwifi in the new installation compared to ndiswrapper in the old installation is less for my particular card in my particular setup. But that doesn't carry over to anyone else at all.

I will report anything substantive here but I don't anticipate there will be anything.

Swerdna

I have seen that blacklisting the ath_pci module is standard practice, but one would think there would be a cleaner method to remove the modules and edit any scripts which might be trying to load the drivers at boot. Some questions (that may or may not be helpful): Are you getting any associated modules still being loaded? Is there any dmesg output suggesting ath_pci and ath_hal are still being associated with your wireless hardware? Are there any network udev rules, that possibly need to be removed?
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Thanks Dean. I finally have it working by uninstalling madwifi, blacklisting ath_pci and using the leftover configuration for ath0 in Yast to take the ndiswrapper driver.

I couldn't install ndiswrapper from RPMs produced by andrewd18 -- dependency problems -- no idea why -- so I compiled from source as in the days of Suse 10.0 --- works fine. And now in a day or two I'll have a comparison of ndiswrapper with the performance of madwifi as per my original intention.

Phew -- not worth the effort

Swerdna

drive-by question== why not use the ndiswrapper that comes on the disk ? saves the hassle of compiling when kernel updates come along

You should stay with madwifi. The performance loss that I spoke about is assuredly temporary. (...)
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Are you perhaps referring to half the max signal strength? Because I am having only 59% signal strength even though I'm 2 meters away from the AP. Did some reading on the issue, apparently the next version fixes that. I'm too lazy to recompile now, I'll play with it with OpenSuSE 11. Perhaps even use ath5k instead.

drive-by question== why not use the ndiswrapper that comes on the disk ? saves the hassle of compiling when kernel updates come along
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Because I'm really dim :blink: But I will next time

Are you perhaps referring to half the max signal strength? Because I am having only 59% signal strength even though I'm 2 meters away from the AP. Did some reading on the issue, apparently the next version fixes that. I'm too lazy to recompile now, I'll play with it with OpenSuSE 11. Perhaps even use ath5k instead.
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No. I was referring to quite long delays in displaying web pages using madwifi -vs- ndiswrapper. But I imagine this is just on my current setup with my specific card. Others should not take this as a general issue.

Swerdna