Wireless networking issues -- Netgear WG311T and Sarge with kernel 2.6.8
Hi everyone,
I'm new to Debian, but not to Linux -- I've run SuSE Linux for about
seven years, but decided to try Debian hoping it might possibly have
better support for wireless networking. So far, that doesn't quite seem
to be the case -- but in some other respects I like Debian, so I'd like
to get the networking thing resolved if possible.
I bought a Netgear WG311T wireless card. The access point is an Apple
Airport Express, but that doesn't seem to be relevant to the problem I'm
experiencing at this point.
SuSE seemed to be having problems connecting when security (WEP or WPA,
didn't seem to matter) was enabled, but everything was fine when I
turned off security.
When I got fed up with this, I decided to download Debian and give it a
try. I downloaded it this past weekend and burned it to two DVDs. The
install went pretty smoothly, except that the 2.4.27 kernel was
installed initially, and no interface was even created for the wireless
card, although I checked /proc/pci and the card was identified in there
as a NIC.
On advice I got from alt.os.linux.debian, I just now installed the 2.6.8
kernel and tried again. Now there is an interface called "ath0" (the
wireless card has an Atheros chipset, hence the name of the interface),
but somehow it doesn't seem to be connected to the hardware -- among
other things, there are messages coming through during boot where the
system tries to initialize the ath0 interface, but it says, "No such
device"; and when I open the graphical "Networking" tool and try to
activate the ath0 interface, the first attempt fails (the interface is
immediately deactivated again), and the second attempt locks up the
Networking tool. Oops.
And there's no /proc/pci file under this kernel, so I can't check that.
Any advice on resolving this?
Best,
Tim
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