Hi all, long time geek and coder Eric Laffoon here. I bought my wife a small notebook at Office Depot. I knew that the Acer Aspire 4730z was also released as a Linux notebook but they didn’t have one and I figured dual boot would be helpful for things like blackberry updates. Here’s the problem, I can’t get a wlan0.
madwifi - no joy - apparently the new b/g/n hardware is too new.
ndiswrapper - no joy - various Atheros drivers and one attempt at Broadcom all produce errors.
Sorry not to offer specifics but this is two days of sleep deprivation. Here’s problem #1.
The wired internet required downloading and installing a driver from Realtek but it was nice that it told me it was an r8168. I’ve got no clue with the wifi. I wrote Acer and they naturally told me how to remove dual boot from my system. Pricks! I’m committed to harassing them until they can tell me what the chip is.
Any help? I hate to have to ask what card to buy to make it work on Linux.
A quick look at the stickies at the start of the wireless section will tell you how to get specific info on the wireless device. Post it here & we will see what we can do
Andy you are worth your weight in gold. I didn’t know how to find the information listed showing vendor and part. Anyway using that I googled that I had an Atheros AR928x and there is a new ath9k driver for it. It seems to have been merged into the 2.6.27 kernel so I downloaded a snapshot for the older 2.6.22+ kernels. Opensuse 11 has 2.6.25.
The good news is after building and installing I ran modprobe ath9k and using Knetworkmanager I got it up and running on my local network… The bad news is it seems to disconnect after a varying time and then it won’t reconnect without rebooting. After some frustration trying to use an RPM kernel I downloaded an ISO of the 11.1beta5 CD and running as a Live CD it recognized the wireless and connected and disconnected flawlessly… So I installed it. During the last part of the install it didn’t want to recognize the wired interface so I rebooted and now that works. However while the ath9k and mac80211 modules appear properly loaded and I don’t see any conflicts I have been unable to get wireless working using networkmanager.
I do see in hardware under “Device Names” it shows as wmaster0… I am not on the laptop here. Using ifconfig Link encap: shows UNSPEC and using iwconfig wmaster0 shows no wireless extentions. There must be some configuration issue I need to search out.
Have a look in YaST - network devices - network settings & see if anything is missing,i.e. encryption,ESSID, module name. If you are using KDE, check network manager is set up correctly
Using ifconfig Link encap: shows UNSPEC and using iwconfig wmaster0 shows no wireless extentions. There must be some configuration issue I need to search out.