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The fresh ¨Woozy Numbat¨ kernel appeared in time for the holiday season, and being home on vacation, I thought it a good time to upgrade the kernel on my MythTV box that (still) remains unfinished. I had problems with ivtv and a newer Hauppauge PVR-350, but this is not the current problem....
It seems that the 2.6.10 kernel does not like my Atheros-based D-Link G520 PCI wireless card (802.11 b/g). When the computer boots, I notice the configuration for ath0 appear, however the process fails and the card is not initialized. Does anyone know of, or have any issues with this chipset and the new kernel? The card is powered on and works, as it still flashes a green led. Furthermore, according to the router´s config, it´s trying to obtain an IP address. I self-compiled the 2.6.10 kernel (I´m not a n00b, but this was my first kernel compile), and I looked to see if there were any Atheros drivers/tools/etc that needed to be compiled, but I have found none. The card previously worked fine in the kernel shipped with SuSE 9.2 (2.6.8-24 default). I´ve read a few forums that talked of patches for 2.6.10-rc2/2.6.10-rc3, but I haven´t been able to come up with solid information. Can anyone help me or point me in the right direction? I´d greatly appreciate it....
-Chris
Linux and Atheros wifi cards
The behaviour you experienced is normal. Support for Atheros-based 802.11b/g cards is _not_ included in the main kernel sources _yet_. You have to add it yourself using the madwifi drivers. More on this can be found here:
http://madwifi.sourceforge.net/
The kernel shipped with your SuSE distro probably has added support for madwifi, courtesy of the SuSE developers.
Also, please note that some kernel interfaces for WiFi must have changed from 2.6.9 to 2.6.10, so older versions of the madwifi drivers will _not_ work. Get the latest version from CVS and hope for the best :-)