setup wireless on OEL5.4 on Acer Laptop with AR928X wireless card
I tried to setup wireless lan on my ACER AS5740. I installed OEL5.5 (Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5) that comes with 2.6.18-194 kernel. Both my ethernet card and wireless lan card were detected, but I ran into the following error: DHCPDISCOVER on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 19
No DHCPOFFERS received.
Later i found out that this issue was caused by the following bug in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=543719
Credit goes to the gstanden (OP) whose posting helped me fix my LAN card.
Original Link: http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=20243&start=20
Thread Title: Re: CentOS 5.3 and Atheros AR928x – wireless network problem
Step 1:
modprobe tg3
Step 2:
check if ndiswrapper is installed. If not install it having a wired connection.
rpm -qa | grep ndis
yum install ndiswrapper
Step 3:
now go to this website http://www.atheros.cz/ to get the WindowsXP 64-bit drivers:
At the bottom of that page you find: AR928X and you want to click the second column WXP 64-bit blue checkmark. On the next page click on the button:
- – - – - – - – - – -
Download
- – - – - – - – - – -
be patient – I guess this mirror is in Czech Republic or something and it takes up to a couple minutes for the download pop-up box to appear.
The download pop-up should be indicating download of: xp3264-7.7.0.456-whql.zip
save it to your desktop or wherever you prefer.
Now open a terminal and go to where you have download this windows driver file and do:
Step 4:
unzip xp3264-7.7.0.259-whql.zip
You want to use the netathwx.inf with ndiswrapper.
NOTE: Be sure to use the netathwx.inf (with an x in the name) and NOT the netathw.inf
Step 5
While located in the directory where the netathwx.inf file is located, do the following command:
ndiswrapper -i netathwx.inf
Next:
ndiswrapper -l
You should get output from this:
netathwx : driver installed
device (168C:002A) present
depmod -a
modprobe ndiswrapper
ndiswrapper -m
Step 7
You have to create an ifcfg-wlan0 file next. But first, you can check if the card is there with this command:
iwlist scan
You should see info on wireless networks which look something like this (and be patient this can take 20-30 seconds if there are alot of networks)
Cell 01 – Address: 00:1E:E5:80:3F:01
ESSID:linksys
Protocol:IEEE 802.11g
Mode:Managed
Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
Quality:26/100 Signal level:-79 dBm Noise level:-96 dBm
Encryption key:off
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
Cell 02 – Address: 00:24:B2:72:36:16
ESSID:ofcnoce57
Protocol:IEEE 802.11g
Mode:Managed
Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
Quality:84/100 Signal level:-42 dBm Noise level:-96 dBm
Encryption key:on
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s
12 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s
48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
Extra:bcn_int=100
Extra:atim=0
IE: WPA Version 1
Group Cipher : TKIP
Pairwise Ciphers (1) : TKIP
Authentication Suites (1) : PSK
etc….
Step
cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
create a file called ifcfg-wlan0 (using vi for example) and put this in it:
DEVICE=wlan0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=yes
METRIC=10
MII_NOT_SUPPORTED=no
WIRELESS_MODE=Managed
WIRELESS_ESSID=any
Step
service network restart
service NetworkManager start
Reboot. NOTE: You may have to add some DNS server to /etc/resolv.conf. One that almost always works is:
nameserver 4.2.2.1
