I have followed just about every darn FAQ on this site. I have followed Larry’s primer on what to do when wireless goes down. I have followed the madwifi help. And yet I still cannot get wireless to work on this system at all.
I’m running an Acer Aspire 3050 that (supposedly; its so darn confusing I really don’t know) has an Atheros AR2413 wireless chip installed. I installed OpenSUSE 11.0 and tried to get wireless to work, although it didn’t let me. Card was there, but wireless access was absent. Being a college student, I went to class, and when I came back–guess what? My card was “missing.” When I right-click on the GNOME Network Manager, “Enable Wireless” isn’t even an option.
I did run dmesg | less and look for my wireless card, and after finding out those little numbers from lspci, this is what I have:
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:08:04.0[A] -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 21
wifi%d: unable to attach hardware: ‘Hardware revision not supported’ (HAL status 13)
ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:08:04.0 disabled
I believe this is somehow connected to madwifi. If so, will removing madwifi make the Atheros card reappear again? (Just FYI: running iwconfig only shows “lo” and “eth0.”)
ghoststrider wrote:
>
>> ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:08:04.0[A] -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 21
>> wifi%d: unable to attach hardware: ‘Hardware revision not supported’
>> (HAL status 13)
>> ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:08:04.0 disabled
>>
>
> I believe this is somehow connected to madwifi. If so, will removing
> madwifi make the Atheros card reappear again? (Just FYI: running
> iwconfig only shows “lo” and “eth0.”)
Obviously madwifi cannot handle the 2413. Looking at the driver source
code, I found that ath5k is the correct driver for it. I do not know
whether that driver is in the standard openSUSE 11.0 kernel (2.6.25),
or if it works. If the answer is no, then I suggest trying the 2.6.27
kernels from http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/3/srodzaj/1/search/kernel-default.
Pick the correct one for your architecture, download and install with
a ‘sudo rpm -iv <downloaded file name>’ command.
The ath5k module is in the default opensuse 11 install.
I had a problem with my wifi card not working (I’m at work right now so I can’t tell you specifically what chipset it uses).
In order to get the madwifi driver (ath_pci) to work I had to disable ath5k by adding it to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist as suggested by a post on another website.
From Larrys post it looks like ath5k is appropriate for your hardware so I guess make sure that it hasn’t been blacklisted and uninstall/disable the ath_pci driver.
Well, wireless is back on the menu, but it isn’t functioning yet. I tried to blacklist the ath_pci module, but gedit won’t let me save the file everything gets blacklisted in. (Apparently I don’t have the proper “permissions,” and so far, I haven’t seen anything in User Management that would seem to change that. Even putting me in the “root” group didn’t fix it.)
Here’s the output from iwconfig:
lo no wireless extensions.
eth0 no wireless extensions.
wmaster0 no wireless extensions.
wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:""
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Tx-Power=27 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2352 B
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
And here’s the output from iwlist scan:
lo Interface doesn’t support scanning.
eth0 Interface doesn’t support scanning.
wmaster0 Interface doesn’t support scanning.
wlan0 No scan results
Should I just delete the wireless device and then reboot?
ghoststrider wrote:
> [Note: I’m directing my frustration at the system, not the people.
> Although I wish they could have made it easier to edit the files.]
What you are asking for is laughingly called the “Windows Security Model”!
To have security, critical files must be protected against
unprivileged users.
While I understand that, and while I understand you can’t customize OpenSUSE beforehand for every user, I am the only person using this laptop. It would make sense for me to blacklist the module, no? I mean, it is my computer.
But rather than come in here and make a crack at Windows, perhaps you could offer more assistance in this matter.
@Andy: Then please tell your devs to not laugh at people who are having trouble using their product. That’s bad customer service. (At least, to our faces that is. You can laugh all you want in the less public areas.)
@Patricko: I got a similar thing with Malcolm’s suggestion, it says “gksu not found.” (And yes, I am running GNOME.) I’m currently trying to download and install the gksu package to see if that’ll work.
Gosh am I stupid. That worked, thank you! At the very least, I now have that troublesome module blacklisted. I’l reboot and see if the wireless returns.
ghoststrider wrote:
> Also, Larry, I apologize. I shouldn’t have been that way. I
> misinterpreted what you said. Sorry.
Apology accepted. I hope you now understand why things are not done
the way you were hoping to accomplish. The extra strong separation
between an ordinary user and the superuser are at the heart of Linux
security, and the major reason that we have few worries concerning
viruses, and other malware.
