Problem with Multiple Wireless Cards

Hello,

Complete Linux noob here, was getting on fine until today I had this problem.

I am trying to use a separate PCMCIA wireless card instead of my built in wireless card as I need something a little better to do wireless security experiments.

Now, SUSE seems to notice both wireless cards perfectly and both seem to see the Wireless Network in range. In yast I told it to remove the configuration for the on-board card and when I plugged in the new card it was recognised and seemingly configured.

So I add the wireless connection via the little network icon on the taskbar to the new wireless card, now named wlan1. SUSE sits and seems to try and connect and then when it does connect it shows itself as having connected to the network via the on board network card (listed as wlan0) that I had disabled! This confused me so on the same little network menu from the taskbar I tried to deactivate the connection with wlan0 and it doesnt do anything. If I ask it to connect through wlan1 it doesnt do anything.

I’m just very confused.

On terminal I did the following:

sudo /sbin/lspci

and I got the following output:

*00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility X1400
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5789 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 21)
0a:09.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx12 Cardbus Controller
0a:09.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments PCIxx12 OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
0a:09.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments 5-in-1 Multimedia Card Reader (SD/MMC/MS/MS PRO/xD)
0b:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5413 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
*

My on board adapter is the an Intel device so its seen as Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection yeah?

My second PCMCIA device is a Linksys WPC55AG which I can only assume is the other device at the end of the list, Atheros Communications Inc. AR5413 802.11abg NIC (rev 01).

Anyone any ideas how to fix/resolve this? Is there a chance that thats the wrong drivers for the Linksys card?

try disabling the on-board via the BIOS if the option is there.Then, the atheros requires the madwifi drivers,so install them & see if that sorts it

Andy

deltaflyer44 wrote:
> try disabling the on-board via the BIOS if the option is there.Then, the
> atheros requires the madwifi drivers,so install them & see if that sorts

That might be a bit drastic. I use two USB wireless devices in addition to my
built-in BCM4311. The current version of NetworkManager does have a bit of
trouble switching sometimes, and disabling the b43 device doesn’t help. What I
do is issue a ‘sudo /sbin/modprobe -rv b43’ to get rid of that driver. Then the
USB device operates correctly.

To do this permanently, add the offending driver to the blacklist file.

Larry