Fedora & Ndiswrapper & Mimo Wireless

[Jeff Vian]

On Tue, 2005-07-26 at 17:30 -0400, Paul Hoy wrote: 
> On Jul 25, 2005, at 12:06 AM, Jonathan Berry wrote:
> 
> > Hi Paul,
> > [notes inline]
> >
> > On 7/24/05, Paul Hoy <paul.hoy at mac.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi Terry,
> >>
> >> Thanks for your email. I should have provided more details in my
> >> original email. Being aware of the 4k of memory issue, I recompiled
> >> the kernel and also tried the Linuxant kernels.  I was able to get
> >> the lights going on the modem, but could never achieve a connection
> >> with the router.
> >>
> >
> > So did you get farther with the 8k stacks versus 4k?  I would think
> > that if you were having issues there that you would get nice things
> > like kernel panics and lockups, not that it just wouldn't work.  But
> > my card works just fine (Broadcom chipset) with the 4k stacks, so I
> > have not seen the symptoms of small stacks when larger ones are
> > needed.  But I have had other problems that resulted in kernel panics
> > and hard locks.
> >
> >
> >> One thing about recompiling the kernel, though. When I used xconfig
> >> to remove the 4k limit, it only gave me the option to disable the
> >> limit and indicated that FC4 would use a 8k limit. I though 16 k was
> >> needed in some cases.
> >>
> >
> > I think Linuxant, as mentioned before has 16k stack kernels.  I've
> > heard that the Linux kernel is going more toward 4k stacks
> > exclusively.
> >
> >
> >> As you suggested, I also used the Network utility to try to activate
> >> the card. The lights came on (as I mentioned), but it could not
> >> connect. I tried several different settings.
> >>
> >> I'm going to try it in SUSE, and see what happens, which is too bad
> >> because I really like FC4.
> >>
> >
> > I don't think that SuSE will do any better than Fedora.  ndiswrapper
> > works just fine with Fedora.  So if you are having problems, it is
> > with the configuration.  SuSE might be able to more easily configure
> > things, but that would be the only possible difference I could think
> > of (I'm not saying that it would be, just that would be a possible
> > difference).
> >
> >
> >> Thanks for your email.
> >>
> >> Paul
> >>
> >
> > If you could give us some specifics, such as wireless card(s) (the
> > output of "lspci" for the card would be helpful), drivers, setup (WEP,
> > etc, (no need to tell us keys, just whether you have it or not)), what
> > you have tried, what hasn't worked, etc.  Without details, we can only
> > help you so much.  With details, someone just might be able to tell
> > you exactly what to do.
> >
> > Jonathan
> >
> > PS: Please do not put your reply above the email you are replying to.
> > That is called top-posting and makes the conversation flow harder to
> > follow when reading.  Please either put your reply below or inline
> > (like this one) as that is the convention on this list.
> >
> > --  
> > fedora-list mailing list
> > fedora-list at redhat.com
> > To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
> >
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Well, I've  begun to work with Fedora again to get  my Linksys  
> WPC54GX working. This time, I wanted to try the Linuxant DriverLoader.
> 
> I downloaded and installed the Linuxant 2.6.12-1.388_FC4.stk16 kernel  
> to address the 4 k stack problem. Upon reboot, I encountered a kernel  
> panic:
> 
> "Kernel panic - not syncing: net/sched ... generic.c:547:  
> spin_is_locked on uninitialized spinlock df4f3170. (Not tainted)"
> 
> Two questions: what may have caused this and which kernel version do  
> I install? i586 or i686? How do I know which is the right one?
> 
> Finally, any hints about restoring the previous kernel would be helpful.
> 
1)
i586 is only needed for very old Pentium and maybe PII processors. PIII
and up all use the I686 kernels.

Also, the kernel version you list "2.6.12-1.388_FC4.stk16" is not in the
list of kernels I see on the linuxant site.  Which kernel did you
actually install?

2)
restoring the previous kernel?
Did you do an install or an upgrade of the kernel?

Even the automatic tools like yum do an install of the kernel so you
have the old kernel available to use if the new one fails.  If you do it
by hand you use "rpm -ivh kernel....rpm" and then the boot menu allows
you to select which kernel you use.

If you did an update and overwrote/deleted the old kernel it is now time
for the rescue disk.

> Thanks,
> Paul Hoy
>