Why does not a WiFi card work in Fedora, when it works in Debian.

Dan grinnz at gmail.com
Wed Jun 7 17:45:25 UTC 2006


Tomas Larsson wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com 
>> [mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Todd Zullinger
>> Sent: Wednesday, June 07, 2006 6:30 AM
>> To: fedora-list at redhat.com
>> Subject: Re: Why does not a WiFi card work in Fedora,when it 
>> works in Debian.
>>
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA1
>>
>> Tomas Larsson wrote:
>>     
>>>>> Been struggling to get a rt61 card to work in FC4.  
>>>>>           
>> So-far with no 
>>     
>>>>> success, not with the various rt61 drivers, nor ndiswrapper.  But 
>>>>> the rt61 chipset is reported to work in debian, why not in Fedora?
>>>>>           
>>>> It may be that the module worked in an older Fedora kernel, but as 
>>>> Fedora keeps moving to keep up with the upstream kernel, sometimes 
>>>> things outside the kernel break.  If Debian ran the same version 
>>>> kernel, it'd likely have the same problem.
>>>>
>>>> (Not just Debian either, the same applies to just about 
>>>>         
>> any distro).
>>     
>>>> 		Dave
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> Ok, question is the, should I drop FC and go for another 
>>>       
>> distro (said 
>>     
>>> to be working) or should I get another card with hopefully another 
>>> chipset and start all over again?
>>>       
>> That's a fairly subjective question.  Is wireless the only 
>> thing you are about?  Have you tried some other distros to 
>> see if they have other things that don't work but which work 
>> in Fedora?  I doubt any distribution is perfect for anyone, 
>> except a distribution you build for yourself.
>>
>> I have a system I built for a friend which includes a Linksys 
>> WMP54G card (using an RaLink RT2500 chipset).  This isn't 
>> supported by the stock Fedora kernels, nor by the vanilla 
>> kernel, but it works out of the box using Ubuntu.  I could 
>> have just gone with Ubuntu on the system but then I'd have 
>> had to deal with other things that either didn't work or 
>> worked differently than how I was used to.  So my choice was 
>> to stick with Fedora on this system but to build the rt2500 
>> driver (I setup a system init script to rebuild the driver on 
>> each reboot if it isn't available, so on any reboot with a 
>> new kernel it will hopefully get built and installed 
>> automatically at the cost of about 30 seconds added to the 
>> bootup of a new kernel).
>>
>> The advantage is that I have a system which I know very well 
>> but which also supports the one piece of hardware which is 
>> installed that Fedora doesn't support out of the box.  If I 
>> went with Ubuntu, I'd still be learning about the subtle 
>> differences between it and Fedora and I'd have to keep up on 
>> them anytime my friend had a question.
>>
>> Your choice might be different.  Only you can answer that effectively.
>>     
>
> I do agree with you, I "really" don't want to change distro, since I'm
> getting familiar with Fedora, but,
> I need that b..dy card up and running.
> It seemms to me that quite a few cards are using RT61 now. So getting a new
> card might turn out with the same problems.
>
> The biggest problem, I think, is that I don't know wether it is the driver,
> wext or wpa_suplicant that causes the problem.
>
> With ndis and windows-driver I cant set ssid nor anything else,
> wpa_supplicant nor wext don't seem to
> Do anything.
> With the rt2x00 driver wpa_supplicant seems not to be able to set the PSK,
> hence I can't accossiate.
>
> The original driver at RaLinkl site crashes the kernel so hard so I have to
> pull the batteries and the plug,
> in order to restart.
>
> Tried to ask questions on both wpa_supplicant and ndis mailing lists, but
> there is no response.
>
> Any suggestions
>
>   
If you're willing to get a new wireless card, ipw2100/2200/2915 and 
atheros chipsets seem to have the best driver support (from livna, 
atrpms, sourceforge itself, etc); ipw chipsets are mostly in 
centrino-based laptops so I don't know if you can purchase it 
separately, but if you google you can find a list of cards with an 
atheros chipset.
-Dan




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