AR242x with ndiswrapper on HP lapflop

[mhauber]

Greets, all.

I have a Compaq Presario F761us, running 8.04_64bit. As the vendor is playing possum on the issue I brought to them (they say they only support vista and xp, which is ridiculous because they sell computers with linux, but whatever)... So using their xp64 drivers for the chipset, I'm able to connect without problems until the computer is restarted.

After kde is loaded, knetworkmanager comes up and chokes at 28% ("Activation stage: Configuring device.")

'sudo lspci -v' gives me:
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Unknown device 137a
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 19
Memory at f6000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2
Capabilities: [50] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-
Capabilities: [60] Express Legacy Endpoint IRQ 0
Capabilities: [90] MSI-X: Enable- Mask- TabSize=1

'ifconfig wlan0' gives me:
wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr (blip, blop, blouey)
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
Interrupt:19 Memory:f6000000-f6010000

'sudo iwlist wlan0 scan' gives me:
wlan0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: (blip, blop, blouey)
ESSID:"MiniMe"
Protocol:IEEE 802.11g
Mode:Managed
Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
Quality:64/100 Signal level:-55 dBm Noise level:-96 dBm
Encryption keyn
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s
24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s
12 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s
Extra:bcn_int=100
Extra:atim=0

In order to get it working again, I have to remove the windows driver and reinstall it again. After that, everything works fine... (Until the next reboot) This is really getting old.

There's got to be something I'm missing here. HAL won't touch it if I've appended 'blacklist ath_pci' to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, correct? Do I need to do something more to keep it from interfering (HAL is the only logical suspect I can think of, but I really don't understand enough about it to prove/disprove)?

If someone out there has run across anything like this, plz let me know before I scrap this piece of junk for parts.

Thanks.

Mike



PS. I recently read somewhere that HP has set the BIOS up on this model so that if I were to replace this wifi card with an "inferior" one, the computer won't boot. Is that even legal for them to do? If this is truly the case (which I'll know shortly), can I force them to give me a BIOS upgrade without the vendor lock-outs? That just doesn't appear as an ethical practice to me.

[yulester]

Re: AR242x with ndiswrapper on HP lapflop

Whooooaaa - - Back up a bit

I think I'm seeing the same kinda problem as you - - I think - - - !!!

Compaq F756NR - Atheros AR6006EG
7.10 Gutsy Gibbons 64 bit

Went through the process as indicated here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=512828

Everything seemed to work OK, but I had to go somewhere with a public wireless network to try it out. Did that - took some fiddling around, but as I recall 'Wireless Assistant' (kdesu wlassistant) was the application to get me connected. Just for the hec of it, before I left, I did a cold boot to confirm my actions - - Nothing worked.

Last tuesday, I went back and tried again. (It's a public library some 25 miles away) I could see 4 wireless networks of which I knew two were in the Library. One public, one hidden (their internal network) with two others in other buildings in the area requiring access codes.

No matter what I did, the system failed to connect even though it could see it. I played with every setting (within reason) to see if I could get the connection, but no luck.

This is sounding somewhat similar to your problem.

What do you think??

[mhauber]

Re: AR242x with ndiswrapper on HP lapflop

Hrm...

So... You use ndiswrapper, boot the laptop, and the wireless sees a public access but cant connect? What happens when you remove the driver from ndiswrapper and then reload it? That works for me every time, but I don't want to have to go through that every time I boot the computer.

I could probably call a script from .xinit or something, but I want to make sure it's not just my setup.

I wouldn't scrap the lapflop, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it either (I found a hack for the BIOS on a similar laptop, so I'll spend the next week playing with mine). I have to admit their tech support got under my skin the other day. I just forgot to add the rant flags when I posted.

Mike