MADWIFI on FC1

Bill Johnson Bill at JohnsonAcres.com
Tue Mar 16 03:00:37 UTC 2004


I'll provide as much detail as possible for this problem, but if you want 
ot cut to the chase, scroll to the end.

I purchased a Proxim Skyline (802.11a with atheros chipset) pcmcia 
wireless card from eBay.  I'm now trying to make it work on my Dell 
Inspiron 2650 running Fedora Core 1.

Here is what I've done.

1.  Inserted the card into the pcmcia slot.

2.  Obtained the madwife drivers via: cvs -z3 
-d:pserver:anonymous at cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/madwifi co madwifi

3.  Compiled them via make and make install.

4.  Following instructions found on madwifi wiki, I created 
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ath0 containing:
# Unknown vendor|Generic ath_pci device
DEVICE=ath0
# Change next line to "ONBOOT=yes" to have this device start at boot
ONBOOT=yes
USERCTL=yes
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
# Uncomment above line and comment out next 4 lines to use DHCP
#BOOTPROTO=static
#IPADDR=192.168.1.2
#NETMASK=255.255.255.0
#GATEWAY=192.168.1.1
WIRELESS=yes
MODE=Managed
ESSID=any
#NICK=''
#NWID=''
#FREQ=''
#CHANNEL=7
#SENS=''
#RATE=11M
#KEY=''your key here''
#RTS=''
#FRAG=''
#IWCONFIG_OPTIONS=''
#IWSPY_OPTIONS=''
#IWPRIV_OPTIONS=''
#
#STARTMODE=hotplug

5.  Did /sbin/modprobe wlan, sbin/modprobe ath_hal, /sbin/modprobe 
ath_pci.

6.  restarted both pcmcia and network with:  /sbin/service pcmcia restart 
and /sbin/service network restart with following results:
[root at laptop sgml]# /sbin/service pcmcia restart
Shutting down PCMCIA services: cardmgr modules.
Starting PCMCIA services: cardmgr.
[root at laptop sgml]# /sbin/service network restart
Shutting down interface eth0:                              [  OK  ]
Shutting down loopback interface:                          [  OK  ]
Setting network parameters:                                [  OK  ]
Bringing up loopback interface:                            [  OK  ]
Bringing up interface ath0:  ath_pci device ath0 does not seem to be 
present, delaying initialization.
                                                           [FAILED]
Bringing up interface eth0:                                [  OK  ]
[root at laptop sgml]#

SO... what's up with the device ath0 not being present?  Did I miss a 
step?  As always, I thank you in advance for your help.

Bill Johnson





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