Finding wireless network driver and rebuilding kernel

[engelsman]

As my first foray into Linux, I downloaded the pre-release of the Gallium Arsenide release and it installed relatively easily. The 2.4.29-normal kernel supplied on the ISO recognised my plain Ethernet card, but not my SMCWPCI wireless card.

I've downloaded the latest linux-2.4.31 sources with the intention of building a new kernel that will work with the wireless card, and this has given rise to my 2 questions here.

I've come unstuck with trying to find a suitable driver for my SMCWPCI wireless network card. Since I set up the wireless hub earlier in the week, http://www/smc.com seems to have gone offline. Their web site did mention Linux, but now I am unable to find any further information.

So, question number 1: does anyone have a pointer for a driver?

I copied the /boot/config-2.4.29-normal.gz into a copy of the 2.4.31 kernel source directory, and used this to 'make menuconfig' with exactly the same settings. I copied the resulting vmlinux, config and system.map to the /boot with new names, checked /etc/lilo.conf, ran /sbin/lilo and rebooted. I was presented with the old boot menu!

Once I had rebooted with the old 2.4.29-normal and run /sbin/lilo -v it told me that the new kernel was too big! And sure enough, it's twice almost twice the size of the other kernels that are in /boot. What I also noticed is that the file command reports the old kernels as bootable whereas the new kernel is a plain executable - I'm posting from a M$ box and don't remember the exact text.

So, question number 2: do I need to change the compiler settings or have I missed another step in building or installing the new kernel?

engelsman

[sofar]

Wifi drivers come with tons of drivers. The kernel ones should support the legacy cards but that still leaves out a lot of drivers.

the hostap-driver module provides a generic driver that will work on hundreds of cards.

All intel-based drivers need a 2.6 kernel and the ipw2100 or ipw2200 drivers (separate modules, not available on the 1.5.x series ISO)

Prism based chipsets sometimes work with the prism54 module or wlan-ng-driver module.

There are some other atheros, mwavem cards out there that have yet other modules. If all else fails then the 'ndiswrapper' module might allow you to actually run the WINDOWS driver to enable this card.

hth!

[sofar]

The vmlinux file that is left after a kernel compile in /usr/src/linux is not a bootable file. It's merely the stripped ELF executable that is the kernel. However, the BIOS bootloader and LILO or grub have no idea how to load ELF objects. This needs some form of 'booting' code.

So, the kernel developers have written a Makefile that creates this executable when you do 'make'. However, you really need to create a packed/compressed file, with a uncompress loader and some operating boot code sequence to get this all to work after lilo or grub finishes.

This is done by adding some x86 bootloader code to the vmlinux file.

In order to build this file, you usually do 'make bzImage'. The bootable image then is put in /usr/src/linux/arch/`arch`/boot/bzImage. Copy this file to your /boot and rename it, and you will be able to boot it.

hth!

[engelsman]

Finally got back to this after having had a broken power supply

I took the opportunity to install the 1.5.1 ISO from scratch, and then follow Sofar's advice to install a 2.6 kernel. lspci reports that my SMCWPCI card uses an Atheros chip, so a quick google turned up the madwifi-cvs module. The combination of the two has led me a merry dance - little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing - but I now have a suitable, bootable kernel. I had to 'Reconfigure kernel' as part of the 'lin linux-2.6' so that I could load the existing 2.4 config from /boot

Then I could 'lin madwifi-cvs' and I have access to the ath0 driver once I have used modprobe to load ath_pci, wlan, and wlan_wep modules. If I turn off the wifi security I can use ifconfig and iwconfig to set the essid, channel and access point, and can restart the ath0 interface so that it gets an IP number via dhcp from the wireless router.

This gives me both eth0 and ath0 running in parallel. If I unplug eth0 or set ath0 as the default gateway, I can see the WLAN light flashing on the router, but hostnames no longer resolve and the connection fails.

Whenever I reboot the ath_pci, wlan and wlan_wep modules are no longer loaded, the ath0 interface is not enabled.

The relevant modules appear in /lib/modules/2.6.12.4/net so what do I need to do to have them loaded automatically

The challenge after that is to configure wpa_supplicant when I re-enable encryption...

[engelsman]

but not with the full WPA configuration on the Wifi router, I've had to drop down a level to plain old WEP. I spent ages trying to configure wpa_supplicant, but to no avail. The installation instructions were not clear to me as a kernel module newbie, so I could easily have got that wrong, but I was also uneasy about the fact that there was no mention of using 's:' to prefix the ascii key to correspond with the 's:' used in lnet or iwconfig. So I might have got that wrong instead, or even as well.

But credit has to go to Sofar and a comment about using hex keys and WEP rather than trying to configure wpa_supplicant, so that's what I've done.

Adding an 'ath_pci' line to /etc/modules seems to have done the trick to get ath0 configured at boot time. The modprobe.conf(5) man page fails to install, so that was a lucky stab in the dark.

Yahoo

[lunar_mike]