Atheros WiFi card detected, not receiving access points

English Network/Internet
1

Hello forum, Linux n00b here.

I will forgo an introduction, because I was never good with them, so here goes.

I followed the Getting Your Wireless to Work tutorial, and I only got to III, where it asks if I need firmware. According to my Hardware Information, my wireless card is a Atheros Communications Inc. AR5413 802.11abg NIC. The machine is an aging HP Pavilion m7500y, which is maybe 5 years old, and has been running Windows primarily until now, when I got a second hard drive, and now dual-boot with SUSE. It has since been upgraded, but nothing related to this problem (more memory, a new graphics card, a new power supply to replace the one that blew up:) SUSE x86-64 11.1 is running on it. I have a Pentium D, which was hot stuff some years ago.

Anyway, my boot.msg actually makes no mention of firmware at all. I copied and pasted into Kate and did a search, and found no reference of firmware, nor did “dmesg | grep firmware” find anything. I did, however, find stuff about wlan0, which was detected in the Wireless LAN section of Hardware Information.

It said this:

Setting up (remotefs) network interfaces:
    wlan0     device: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5413 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
              No configuration found for wlan0
unusedSetting up service (remotefs) network  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .done

Hardware Information said my kernel driver was ath5k.

YaST could see my card fine, and I could tinker with all the settings endlessly in YaST and in NetworkManager, but no matter what I did, it would not detect any access points. I have a 2WIRE router 2 rooms away with WEP encryption (used to be WPA-PSK, but my DS doesn’t like it for some reason.) This network works fine in Windows (in fact, I’m using it to submit this post). I also have a few other access points around, including my city’s municipal one with routers atop telephone poles at intervals. All could be received in Windows, but not in SUSE.

My question is, does my card actually need firmware, and SUSE is lying to me, or does it need something else done to it?

Thank you all.

P.S. I used Kubuntu prior to SUSE, but I found it wasn’t really my bag. Kubuntu worked with my wireless card flawlessly. Sorry, I don’t have any logs, because I formatted the drive preceding the SUSE Installation.

2

That’s bumptastic!

3

ThatBum wrote:
> Hello forum, Linux n00b here.
>
> I will forgo an introduction, because I was never good with them, so
> here goes.
>
> I followed the ‘Getting Your Wireless to Work’
> (http://tinyurl.com/cwx2vt) tutorial, and I only got to III, where it
> asks if I need firmware. According to my Hardware Information, my
> wireless card is a Atheros Communications Inc. AR5413 802.11abg NIC. The
> machine is an aging HP Pavilion m7500y, which is maybe 5 years old, and
> has been running Windows primarily until now, when I got a second hard
> drive, and now dual-boot with SUSE. It has since been upgraded, but
> nothing related to this problem (more memory, a new graphics card, a new
> power supply to replace the one that blew up:) SUSE x86-64 11.1 is
> running on it. I have a Pentium D, which was hot stuff some years ago.
>
> Anyway, my boot.msg actually makes no mention of firmware at all. I
> copied and pasted into Kate and did a search, and found no reference of
> firmware, nor did “dmesg | grep firmware” find anything. I did, however,
> find stuff about wlan0, which was detected in the Wireless LAN section
> of Hardware Information.
>
> It said this:
>
>
> Code:
> --------------------
> Setting up (remotefs) network interfaces:
> wlan0 device: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5413 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
> No configuration found for wlan0
> unusedSetting up service (remotefs) network . . . . . . . . . .done
> --------------------
>
>
> Hardware Information said my kernel driver was ath5k.
>
> YaST could see my card fine, and I could tinker with all the settings
> endlessly in YaST and in NetworkManager, but no matter what I did, it
> would not detect any access points. I have a 2WIRE router 2 rooms away
> with WEP encryption (used to be WPA-PSK, but my DS doesn’t like it for
> some reason.) This network works fine in Windows (in fact, I’m using it
> to submit this post). I also have a few other access points around,
> including my city’s municipal one with routers atop telephone poles at
> intervals. All could be received in Windows, but not in SUSE.
>
> My question is, does my card actually need firmware, and SUSE is lying
> to me, or does it need something else done to it?
>
> Thank you all.
>
> P.S. I used Kubuntu prior to SUSE, but I found it wasn’t really my bag.
> Kubuntu worked with my wireless card flawlessly. Sorry, I don’t have any
> logs, because I formatted the drive preceding the SUSE Installation.

The ath5k does not need external firmware. If it had, the logs would
have mentioned it.

With WEP, are you putting a passphrase or a hex key? You need to do
the latter.

4

See, it’s not even recieving any access points. There isn’t anything to put a key into.

5

ThatBum wrote:
> See, it’s not even recieving any access points. There isn’t anything to
> put a key into.

Even with ‘sudo /usr/sbin/iwlist scan’?

6

ThatBum wrote:
> See, it’s not even recieving any access points. There isn’t anything to
> put a key into.

Even with ‘sudo /usr/sbin/iwlist scan’?

7

Indeed, it just says I can’t scan because the network is down.

8

ThatBum wrote:
> lwfinger;1996677 Wrote:
>> ThatBum wrote:
>>> See, it’s not even recieving any access points. There isn’t anything
>> to
>>> put a key into.
>> Even with ‘sudo /usr/sbin/iwlist scan’?
>
> Indeed, it just says I can’t scan because the network is down.

Sometimes NetworkManager has a problem getting started. Try ‘sudo
ifconfig wlan0 up’ first. That may break the logjam. In any event, you
should be able to scan with the above command.

9

‘sudo ifconfig wlan0 up’ did nothing. However, I ran iwlist scan in root, and it said the scan ran, but it didn’t find anything. Curious…

Thank you for your help and patience.

10

You know what I’ll think I’ll do, I’m going to get the x86 SUSE and see what happens. My previous install of Kubuntu was 32 bit, and it worked fine. I got the 64 bit SUSE here because it said it would work best with my processor, but I guess it’s disagreeing with some of my hardware. I’m getting the 32 bit now from the torrent, I’m going to burn it in a while and tell you all how it goes.

Godspeed.

11

Well, I installed 32 bit SUSE, and unfortunately, I have the same problem, errors, and logs as 64 bit. Just for the heck of it, I installed Kubuntu 64 bit, and it connected fine. So it’s a SUSE-specific problem, and not a processing architecture problem.

I’m out of ideas. Any of yours?

12

What I was able to do which worked (for a few hours) was to boot into Ubuntu and ensure I could access my wireless access points from there then boot into opensuse and it would work. My own problem is similar to yours but different, as it just randomly drops the connection and I have to fiddle with the wireless kill switch on my AA1 to try to get it working again.

13

My problem is that after upgrade from 11 to 11.1 on my Acer Aspire 5315 i dont see any wireless networks, I saw few but after one reboot they are gone.
Even if I have the same wpa_supplicant.conf file scanning shows nothing and trying to connect leaves my ath0 disconnected. :frowning:
I dont know what to do.