Wireless Problems IBM/Lenovo T60 Thinkpad with Atheros AR5212 wireless Card

[decoy415]

It's been 2 days and 2 fresh installs. I just cannot seem to get this stupid thing to connect to an access point.

Here is the situation:
I'm dual booting Windows XP and Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron (32bit). XP side the card is working fine. Kubuntu side I can see wireless networks, the manager recognizes my card, and the Bluetooth works perfectly. But when trying to connect it never makes it past 28%. Connecting using iwconfig and dhclient from command line doesn't work either.

Here is what I have tried:
First I tried connecting to different kinds of networks. No dice. WEP, WPA, unprotected. It doesn't matter they all hate me. So first I plugged in a hard line (yes the regular nic works fine.) and downloaded build-essential and all the other absolutely necessary stuff. So then I tried a madwifi install. Then I tried with wpasupplant. After this I tried to fall back on the windows driver using ndiswrapper. None of these worked. I even tried different drivers in ndiswrapper. Nothing. Notta. Not even a change in the way the machine reacted. Every time it was 28% and fail.

Here are the sites I've been looking at:
http://www.jjjennnnn.com/kubuntu87445bu.html
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wi...er/Ndiswrapper
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to...xpress_Adapter
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=419348
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Ubuntu_6.10_(Edgy_Eft)_on_a_ThinkPad_T6 0
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=126266
and a few other madwifi sites I forgot to save.

I know I sound like a lost cause but I really need this stupid laptop to work for school. The school assigned this laptop so it's the one I have to use, but the CS department requires a linux install, that the IT department won't support. Please any help at all is very appreciated! Thank you in advance!

[nilsA]

Re: Wireless Problems IBM/Lenovo T60 Thinkpad with Atheros AR5212 wireless Card

There was one kernel that did not support all Atheros WIFI. If I remember this right, the version ended wilt ~19 - the one before and after worked fine for me.

Your case may not be the same - but have you tried to use old fashioned wiret Internet to get all the updates after the install?

[ppberns]

Re: Wireless Problems IBM/Lenovo T60 Thinkpad with Atheros AR5212 wireless Card

Hi,

I have a T61 with Atheros and I had all kinds of problems with connecting to my router. I connected via cable and did synaptic install of "wicd". I unplugged the cable rebooted and brought up "wicd" it picked up the network and I congiged it with my wep key and haven't looked back since.
Put this in your sources.list file:
deb http://apt.wicd.net hardy extras
The version I am running is 1.4.2. There maybe newer but this is the one that works for me and it ain't broke.... :-)

Good luck.

[decoy415]

Re: Wireless Problems IBM/Lenovo T60 Thinkpad with Atheros AR5212 wireless Card

Thanks for all the help so far! I downloaded wicd. Mostly because KNetworkManager is terrible.

So far I've tried to use that with the default drivers and madwifi with wpasupplicant. That was a huge failure. It freezes at "Obtaining IP address...".

I'm now going to try blacklisting those and loading ndiswrapper. Wish me luck! If anyone has any more advice feel free. I'm about ready to throw this thing through a wall.

Again a big thanks to everyone who has helped so far!!

[kjjjjshab]

Re: Wireless Problems IBM/Lenovo T60 Thinkpad with Atheros AR5212 wireless Card

...If anyone has any more advice feel free. I'm about ready to throw this thing through a wall.

I always had trouble getting ndiswrapper to work with anything but WEP (with my Atheros card), but I certainly hope your experience will be better.

I think there is a Qt port of the GUI for ndiswrapper if you were going to use the old GTK one... I saw it once on kde-apps.org...

[decoy415]

Re: Wireless Problems IBM/Lenovo T60 Thinkpad with Atheros AR5212 wireless Card

THANK GOD IT'S OVER!!!

Ok here's the solution.

I was able to fix it simply by getting madwifi and wpasupplicant to work. The problem was a combination of needing the linux-restricted-modules and compiling madwifi CORRECTLY.

First download the linux-restricted-modules package. I have no idea how to do this without a connection, I just used my ethernet connection which was working.

Second, follow the directions in the link below to compile madwifi correctly.
***WARNING***
Make sure you change the kernel numbers to the ones in YOUR KERNEL!
***************
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=38972

Third, also download the wpasupplicant package.

I used wicd to connect because it's more responsive and editable than KNetworkManager.

After ALL of this, I can now connect to Unprotected, WEP protected, and WPA1 protected networks. Good luck to anyone else with this problem! I know it was tough for me, you'll need all the help you can get.