Getting ath5k module to work with Atheros based wifi cards

[pilotgi]

Has anyone been able to get this ath5k module to work? I have a D-Link WDA 1320 pci card with Atheros ar2413 chipset. It is detected during install but it cannot be activated.

I'm having the same problem with openSUSE and I was wondering if anyone has gotten it to work with Fedora 9.

[kpearsonxyz]

I have a new Acer 5520 laptop that shipped with Vista. I just put Fedora 8 and ath5k comes up. I didn't know about the switch before installing, so tried to download the MadWiFi drivers similar to how I used to do it on an older laptop (now running PCLInuxOS because wifi just worked out of the box; no twiddling). Everything broke, so I did some research and found out about ath5k.

Like you, the card is recognized, but won't start. When I try to do ifconfig, there's no ath0 or wlan0, which I understand have to be there to work. I can see wlan0 with iwconfig, but not with ifconfig.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Unless I can get this solved, I will be forced to go back to Vista Home Premium, which I really don't want to do. It's pretty, but flaky... Besides, with the nVidia proprietary drivers, Fedora 8 looks much better than Vista...

[pilotgi]

Are you aware that Fedora 9 is out? Anyway, it doesn't make any difference as far as the ath5k module is concerned. There are some madwifi modules at madwifi.org that may work with your kernel.

Then there's always ndiswrapper that can be used with the windows drivers. I haven't tried any of these myself as I'm waiting a little while longer for the ath5k developers to add support for more Atheros chipsets.

[kpearsonxyz]

I'll go get f9 and see what happens. That not working, I will have to take a look at ndiswrapper. These types of areas are where PCLinuxOS kicks butt over every other distribution I've tried. They have a control center that does ndiswrapper for you. You just follow the prompts... not to mention they don't update the kernel without you asking them too. It's a very user-friendly distro...

Of course, I've used Redhat and Fedora longer, so here I am back with a new piece of hardware.

[scottro]

A lot of the Acers have the AR5007EG card. I have a page with a section about determining if that's the card and if so, how to get it working (on 32 bit installs).
http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/rhwireless.html#5007

I'd say my page has about a 90 percent success rate. <shrug>.

[kpearsonxyz]

Thanks for the link. One thought I have on the make uninstall... issue you see on Ubuntu might be the order in /etc/resolv.conf and perhaps making a change in the order of things might make a difference? Just a thought.