My friend has purchased a new laptop for his wife (a Christmas present), and he’s asked me to install 11.2. The Install went fine, but then it got really tough. Everything seems to work EXCEPT the network cards.
The wired NIC is ID’d by Windows 7 as an Atheros AR8132 PCI-E and is recognized as the same by YAST, but is not configurable as it’s grayed out. The following error message is shown:
Unable to configure the network card because the kernel device (eth0, wlan0) is not present. This is mostly caused by missing firmware (for wlan devices). See dmesg for details.
(see dmesg)
The wireless NIC is an Realtek RTL8192SE (according to Windows 7). This card is not even detected by YAST and is ID’d as an 8172 using lspci.
I found an INF file on the Windows side and tried to set that up in ndiswrapper but no luck. I found a driver file for the Atheros card on another site and tried to compile that without success.
I’ve spent way too much time on this now, and I’m getting really tired of “sneaker netting” files on and off this PC by thumb drive only to be unsuccessful getting a working NIC, so I’m hoping for some suggestions and handholding from someone a lot cleverer than I. I"m not a complete noobie any more, but I’d still be much better off if someone could offer basic howto info, as I’m obviously out of my depth here.
Here’s what I see with lspci:
lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub (rev 07)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)
00:1a.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 03)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 03)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 93)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation ICH9M LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation ICH9M/M-E SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
06:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): O2 Micro, Inc. Device 10f7 (rev 01)
06:00.1 SD Host controller: O2 Micro, Inc. Device 8120 (rev 01)
06:00.2 Mass storage controller: O2 Micro, Inc. Device 8130 (rev 01)
07:00.0 Ethernet controller: Attansic Technology Corp. Atheros AR8132 / L1c Gigabit Ethernet Adapter (rev c0)
08:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 8172 (rev 10)