Drivers for Atheros Communications Inc. AR2413 802.11bg?

English Network/Internet
1

I’m trying to get WiFi up and running on an older desktop PC. lspci gives me the following information about the WiFi card:

00:0d.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR2413 802.11bg NIC (rev 01)

Is there an RPM package for the driver that I need? If no, what should I do to install the driver manually? The PC in question doesn’t have any other form of direct internet access. It does have an Ethernet port, but the WiFi router is too far away to hook it up to the access point directly.

2

The free open source driver for atheros nominally is “ath5k” : ath5k - Linux Wireless No firmware is required to be loaded from userspace. It is a completely free and open-source driver. Devices containing Atheros AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, AR5213, AR5414, AR2413 or AR242x chipsets are supported by ath5k and hence your AR2413 should be supported.

The ath5k is delivered with the kernel (which means you should already have this driver) and it should load as a kernel module.

What desktop / openSUSE version are you using? IMHO typically gnome (and LXDE) are easier to get working with wireless than KDE (note this is not intended to be a KDE put down as I am a big KDE fan).

3

I can see by doing sudo /sbin/modprobe -l | grep ath that this module you’re talking about, ath5k, has been loaded. (This was after installing madwifi. I don’t know if it was there before I did the install.) However, /sbin/ifconfig only displays the eth0 and lo interfaces, so I’m assuming that the driver didn’t work. Did I forget something? I’m using openSUSE 11.3 with KDE.

4

I think it correct to say ath5k definitely was there before you intalled madwifi.

My guess is having both ath5k and madwifi could cause problems, and you may be better off removing madwifi (ie remove any madwifi rpms).

In openSUSE-11.3 KDE4 one typically uses knetworkmanager to configure the wireless. If it is not present, then you may need to go to YaST > Network Devices > Network Settings and either select “user controlled with network manager” (in which case you configure with knetwork manager) or go to deselect “user controllerd with network manager” and configure with YaST.

My experience with KDE4 is if one kept their /home/user directory when updating from openSUSE-11.2 to 11.3, then knetworkmanager does not work well unless one starts a new user account.

5

Okay, this is weird… Network Settings knew the card, but hadn’t configured it. I then transferred control to KNetworkManager. It can see my WiFi network, but it is unable to connect to it. It keeps asking for the WEP key* as if I entered it incorrectly which isn’t true. If I set up the WiFi connection in YaST, I can connect to the gateway’s HTTP-based admin in Firefox but not the internet.

6

That reads like kwallet was not setup ? Do you have it set for automatic reconnect ? Did you setup kwallet ?

I’m probably ‘in’ over my head here as I am not a wireless knowledgeable person.

7

I haven’t set up kwallet, but I instructed KNetworkManager to store the password unencrypted.

I forgot to add this to my previous post…

  • Yes, I know WEP is insecure. But we still have old WiFi cards around the house that don’t support WPA.
8

Others will need to chime in here. My very limited experience is kwallet is the app that stores the password. Hence in one has not setup kwallet, it won’t keep the password long enough to connect. But I could be wrong … someone who actually knows better needs to chime in.

9

You were onto something… apparently you need to set up a wallet and only then change KNetworkManager’s data storage setting to unencrypted. It’s probably one of those lame KDE 4.4 bugs. I’m gonna upgrade the computer to KDE 4.5 later today.

You didn’t have to be a wireless expert to help me out after all. :wink: