Re: Setting up Atheros Ar5001 wifi

[Sebastian <levi.vibes@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 05:42PM +0200, Ogya Chief wrote:
> Hi All,
>
Hi Ogya

> I am have a Toshiba Satelite LD300 laptop with the AR5001 wifi card. I
> installed Sueeze on it and the two things that I cannot get to work are the
> wireless card
  ...snip...

I have a Fujitsu Esprimo laptop which uses the same Wifi-chipset. It
took me quiet a while to get it working but I succeeded with
madwifi. Wifi works perfectly for me now.

The native linux drivers for the atheros chipset seem to be getting
better all the time but for me they only work for about 1/2h--1h
before I loose connection and have to either reboot or reload all the
wifi-related modules.

So here's what I did (roughly, it's been almost a year now):

When I started off on this journey the current 'testing' kernel
(squeeze) was version 2.6.18 (or 2.6.26, I'm not sure). I think the
first time around I got it working by just installing madwifi-source
(from the non-free branch of the debian repositories) and
module-assistant ('apt-get install madwifi-source module-assistant'
as root, let apt-get install whatever it says needs to be installed)
and then building and installing the modules with 'm-a prepare, m-a
a-i madwifi' (you'll probably have to run these as root as well). Also
I have to say that I'm not sure if the madwifi-(source|tools|modules)
are still in the testing-repositories as I use apt-pinning (testing,
stable, unstable).

As I was saying above I'm still running kernel 2.6.26 (which is ok
because it has all the functionality I need for now - and much more)
which is due to the fact that I just never got to get the
madwifi-modules to build properly on any later releases (I'm only
using the debian repositories). So if you're running a later release I
think you might be in for a little bit more trouble.

I'm running a custom-built kernel now, this because at some stage the
module-assistant refused to build the madwifi-modules for me. Can't
remember why, think the madwifi-source was just getting too "old" for
the newer kernels. But it works like a charm with 2.6.26 for me.

Also I think there might be different AR5001-Chipsets, as:
  aku@hexbrex:~$ lspci |grep -i ath
  02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5001
  Wireless Network Adapter (rev 04)
                            ^^^^^^

Hope that gave you a bit of a starting point.

Let us know how you get on.

Cheerio

Sebi

-- 
By the yard, life is hard.
By the inch, it's a cinch.