Monday, February 11, 2008

Wireless now working on PCLOS

Finally got wireless working on PCLOS and despite my earlier desperation (thinking that madwifi drivers just don't work in pclos and almost ready to try ndiswrapper) it really wasn't that difficult.
The secret seems to be that Madwifi just won't tolerate any old unused drivers or driver parts left on the filesystem.
I got this idea after reading the ndiswrapper guide which says that every mention of ndiswrapper must be deleted before installing a new driver.
So, I had two madwifi folders on my Desktop. So, entered EACH one in turn and applied the madwifi script from here.
Uninstalled everything I could until only three archived madwifi rpms and one madwifi-unload module were left.
Then downloaded, compiled and installed the svn trunk madwifi from here
After this I ran "modprobe ath_pci" and then iwconfig showed ath0 as one of the network devices. The rest was easy.
However still can't get the wireless to connect at boot. Apparently I'm using NetApplet which seems to be PClos's version of nm-applet. However, it doesn't seem to connect the wireless automatically at boot as nm-applet does.
I tried installing knetworkmanager. This puts an applet in the tray but the tiptool says its not running and no active devices are registered to it.
I'll have to look into this a bit more.

Edit: (25-02-08)
I booted to pclos today but this time typing "modprobe ath_pci" gave me a "command not found" error. Also iwconfig and ifconfig gave the same errors. That sounds to me like the madwifi driver is not working.
So, I went about re-installing it from the same source as I described here. But the "make" was very short and showed some "nothing to do" statements. Don't understand this.
In addition I went to System>Administartion>Configure your computer>Networks&Internet>Reconfigure a Network Interface.
Here I found under the wireless tab, that no essid was present. So I entered "eircom1073 4700" and applied etc.
Then I rebooted and this time the wireless connected at boot.
I'm very surprised at this as it really doesn't seem like I did anything extraordinarily different. Nevertheless, it works fine and I shouldn't complain.

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