madwifi Slackware 13

[Leonard the Committed]

Alright, when it comes to getting my atheros wifi card up I need to get
the madwifi package and install it. Alien Bob's wiki explains things well
enough, but sorry to say, I need a nice clean package made to get things
going in my world.

Tried to use the slackbuild written for 12.2 on 13 with no luck, it spat
errors and never finished building. Have searched around on google and
have not found a package or slackbuild for 13 yet. Does anyone out there
have one?

[Douglas Mayne]

Are you sure you need the package at all? AFAIK, atheros was accepted into
the mainline kernel. The module is either ath5k or ath9k. I only needed
madwifi before official kernel support was added. I also quickly checked
a recent kernel firmware package and I don't see any firmware associated
with atheros, but I could be wrong.

--
Douglas Mayne

[Dan C]

On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:33:56 +0000, Leonard the Committed wrote:

> Alright, when it comes to getting my atheros wifi card up I need to get
> the madwifi package and install it. Alien Bob's wiki explains things
> well enough, but sorry to say, I need a nice clean package made to get
> things going in my world.

I haven't used an Atheros card in a long while, but I believe that
chipset is now supported natively in the kernel, and the madwifi package
may not be needed any more...

> Tried to use the slackbuild written for 12.2 on 13 with no luck, it spat
> errors and never finished building. Have searched around on google and
> have not found a package or slackbuild for 13 yet. Does anyone out there
> have one?

Ummmm.... there is a Slack 13 version of the slackbuild right there on
slackbuilds.org...

--
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".
"Bother!" said Pooh, as he garotted another passing Liberal.
Usenet Improvement Project: http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/

[Leonard the Committed]

On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:33:56 +0000, Leonard the Committed wrote:

Thank you both for your input. From looking at dmesg it does not appear
that ath0 starts automatically. I've been able to set up and use a
Slackware rig for several years, but have depended on pre made packages
to do it. Is this a type of thing where I need to insert a module?

[Douglas Mayne]

The module should be inserted automatically. You can check if it is
loaded. On my Slackware 12.2 system I get this:

# lsmod | grep ath
ath5k 117264 0
mac80211 161704 1 ath5k
led_class 3664 1 ath5k
cfg80211 61676 2 ath5k,mac80211

The device name will be wlanx, as defined by the udev rules in the file,
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules:

<begin file list>
# This file was automatically generated by the //lib/udev/write_net_rules
# program, run by the persistent-net-generator.rules rules file.
#
# You can modify it, as long as you keep each rule on a single
# line, and change only the value of the NAME= key.

# PCI device 0x11ab:0x4354 (sky2)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"

# PCI device 0x168c:0x001c (ath5k_pci)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="wlan*", NAME="wlan0"
<end file list>

Note: the device name is wlanx, not athx as used in previous atheros/madwifi
incarnations.

I am also using the wicd package (from extra) to manage wifi connections.
It handles managing the available wifi networks, manages their encryption
keys, etc. It takes a lot of the pain out of wireless networking. (It
should be in the default package group, IMO).

If you are not using wicd, then you can use dhcpcd manually (and include
wpa_supplicant for encryption). Here is the output from my system:

# ifconfig wlan0

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
inet addr:192.168.21.101 Bcast:192.168.21.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: xxxx Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:673969 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:601816 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:689042027 (657.1 MiB) TX bytes:146011045 (139.2 MiB)

The old tools still work, but wicd makes things go smoothly, When trouble
crops up, then the command line tools still come in handy. YMMV.

Note: My specific hardware addresses in output above was blocked out (xxxx).

--
Douglas Mayne

[Leonard the Committed]

It is running fin and dandy under 12.2. 13 is on a seperate patiton of
the same machine. As far as I can tell, the module is not being loaded at
boot time. That's what I'm looking into anyhow.