Trying to get wireless card to work in FC6

[Mike C]

Richard England <rlengland <at> verizon.net> writes:
  
> I have a a Toshiba laptop running FC 6  with uname showing  kernel 
> 2.6.20-1.2933.fc6  running a  DWL G650 AirPlus PCMCIA card
> 
> rpm -qa  reports:
>     madwifi-0.9.3-1.lvn6
>     kmod-madwifi-0.9.3-1.2.6.20_1.2933.fc6
> 
> When a new kernel comes out, there is an understandable lag before the 
> new kernel modules appear on Livna.  Is it possible that you had the 
> wrong module installed?
> 
> /etc/modprobe.conf shows  "alias ath0 ath_pci"
> 
> I'm using NetworkManager  to handle the network setup and everything is 
> working fine.  Had to enable NetworkManager and 
> NetworkManagerDispatcher  using "System>Administration>Services", initially.

Thanks Richard - I had the correct kernel and there was no i586 problem. Also I
had installed the latest livna version - I did have the two extra lines in
modprobe.conf and I also tried with NetworkManager but it made no difference.

I will try again with the livna rpms but use just the one line in modprobe.conf.
 Also rather than just load the modules I will reboot the machine after doing
changes and then plug the card in - sometimes for some reason I noted that the
card initialises differently after re-booting compared to using say ifdown and
then ifup.  At one point I had ifconfig and iwconfig showing the correct ssid
and key but it still did not associate!

Anyway I will try again and report more in a day or so. The main reason for my
original post was to see if someone had a step by step howto - so I could
compare with my attempts - to see where I may have gone wrong.  I am not
entirely new to wifi on laptops and have ipw2200 on one machine, and ipw3945 on
another which I compile myself and which do work.  It is just on this final
machine with no internal wireless that I need a plug-in wireless card - and I
did not know if it was my ineptness which stopped me from getting it going or if
there was a bug in either the kernel or drivers which was the problem... but I
will persist and keep going till it works !

Mike