Theresa Arzadon-Labajo

Wireless on Thinkpad T40 running Fedora Core 6

Posted by Theresa Arzadon-Labajo (tarzadon) on Jan 12 2007
Tech Stuff >> Unix-Linux
My IBM T40 laptop has the IBM 11a/b/g Wireless Adapter with the Atheros AR5212 802.11abg chipset.
Reading other people's posts, I read that the madwifi drivers would work.
I tried installing the madwifi rpms from ATrpms, but ran into problems.
I then tried installing the rpms from Livna, but it wanted to upgrade the kernel as well and it wouldn't install.

So, I tried rebuilding the kernel. It wouldn't work! Apparently other people were having issues trying to rebuild the FC6 kernel as well, so scratched that idea.

I went back to the MadWifi site and tried installing the tarball, but the make kept giving errors about linux.h not being found. Someone wrote that the files had to be edited in order for make to work. So, I did that. But when I tried to modprobe, it said that the modules were wrong. Back to the drawing board again.

According to the MadWifi Compatilibilty, the T40 was listed as only being able to work with the madwifi-old package. So, I tried installing that, but it didn't work. Then looking at the list again, the T40 was listed as having the 5211 chipset, but I have the 5212 chipset. The madwifi package should have worked.

I gave up then put the laptop aside for a couple weeks, being absolutely frustrated.

I decided to re-install FC6 and start all over again. And like a crazy person, I tried installing the madwifi module exactly as I did before...and obviously got the same results.

I revisted the MadWifi site, went to http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/GettingMadwifi . Under downloading .rpms->Feodra users, I downloaded the tarball http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-ng-current.tar.gz
I did an rpmbuild -ta, then installed the rpms. And voila!, it worked...


Last changed: Feb 27 2020 at 4:00 PM

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