Re: Setting up Atheros Ar5001 wifi

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

> > > 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...
> >
> 
> Thanks Sebi for you reply.
> 
> Unfortunately, madwifi-(source|tools|modules) are not in the testing
> repositories.
> In the absence of them what are my options. Backports? I see that they are in
> etch
> and lenny. Do I have to downgrade my installation in order to get it working?
>

No there's no need to downgrade the whole system. You could go for
apt-pinning, which essentially means that you'll fetch the
package-lists from various releases (testing, stable, unstable) and
configure apt to "prefer" one of them so that when you install/upgrade
it automagically choses the distro you prefer but you'll see all the
available packages in your synaptics/aptitude/apt-get-lists.  This is
achieved by: 1. add the relevant repositories to your
/etc/apt/sources.list (e.g. add the "stable" or "lenny" repositories,
also make sure you have the non-free branches included as that's where
the madwifi-* packages reside), then change the file
/etc/apt/preferences (create it if it doesn't exist yet) to something
like this:

  aku@hexbrex:~$ cat /etc/apt/preferences
  Package: *
  Pin: release a=testing
  Pin-Priority: 700

  Package: *
  Pin: release a=stable
  Pin-Priority: 650

the above entries basically tell apt-get & Co. to prefer the testing
versions of any package over the stable ones (the higher
"Pin-Priorities" are the preferred ones). But it'll be able to "see"
all the packages from all the releases included in your sources.list.
Then run 'apt-get update' or 'aptitude update' or whatever other way
you use to update your package-cache. Now you should be able to
install madwifi et al.

There's also a bit of configuration to be done in
/etc/modprobe.d/madwifi, uncomment the line:
  blacklist ath5k

and comment out all the lines below
  ## madwifi (non-free)

Hope that helps

> >
> > 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)
> >
> The output of lspci |grep -i ath is the following:
> 05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5001
>  Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)
>

I hope the differences between the revisions aren't too big - I assume
the native linux ath*-drivers probably won't work for you either. Or
did anybody have much luck going down that route? I'd much prefer to
be using free drivers if possible.

Good Luck

Sebi

-- 
Four thousand different MAGNATES, MOGULS & NABOBS are romping in my
gothic solarium!!