DJA wrote:
rbw wrote:
DJA wrote:
You're using the madwifi-ng driver right? If I'm not mistaken, I
think that is the only driver that works properly with the latest
wifi tools.
I saw that too and I need to dig to see what I have is the same but I
was expecting to see madwifi-ng, but what I have doesn't indicate the
"ng" part:
$ rpm -qa|grep madwifi
madwifi-0.9.2.1-1.lvn6
kmod-madwifi-0.9.2.1-1.2.6.18_1.2868.fc6
madwifi-devel-0.9.2.1-1.lvn6
As you can see I got mine from the Livna repository. Core, Extras,
Updates, and Livna and all the repos that go with them are the only
repos I have used so far. And BTW so far all my multimedia stuff has
come back under fc6 (flac, mp3, etc.)
BTW, you need to make sure that Wireless Extensions is installed,
which if you are using a major distro, probably is.
This is FC6 so it has:
$ rpm -qa|grep wireless
wireless-tools-devel-28-1.fc6
wireless-tools-28-1.fc6
rbw
After looking again at the WT website
(http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html)
the real question becomes not whether Wireless Tools are installed,
but whether your driver supports the Wireless Extensions API.
Yeah, this is what I am focusing on which is to see all the options for
drivers that can successfully launch the wireless card after the
preliminaries of the wireless tools and all the other separate
components are in place
Other wireless maintainers have consistently complained that the
Madwifi maintainers have not and are still way behind the current
movement toward WE standardization in Linux. I'd say the the vast
majority of driver related questions and problems put to wireless
developer mailing lists (e.g. HostAP, NetworkManager, WPA_supplicant,
etc.) are related to the Madwifi driver.
My suggestion is to subscribe to one or all of the lists above and ask
for help there. Doing so helped me get my IPW2200 working with
wpa_supplicant.
I agree, I'll go to those forums and I want to thank you and everyone
for pointing me in the right direction to find out the options available
and how to actually get a good understanding of why this worked under
these circumstances after the FC6 upgrade. But I'm not changing any of
this stuff that works until I get there ;^)
Here's a couple of quotes from the NetworkManager list:
"Are you saying that the old madwifi doesn't work at all, or that it
just drops and reconnects every 20 seconds?
"It seems madwifi-ng is pretty F-ed up right now, given my experience
with it on Monday with a fresh pull of SVN. It doesn't even rescan and
attempt to reassociate when you set a new essid on the thing."
-- Dan Williams (NM maintainer)
***
"Since madwifi-ng's WEXT support really sucks, you probably want
to use the 'madwifi' wpa_supplicant driver, which requires a patch to
NetworkManager. NM doesn't include this patch right because it's a
point of debate, both among all of us, and myself personally. We need
to push madwifi-ng to support WEXT correctly since that's the Linux
standard for wireless drivers, but until they do, NM is unlikely to work
very well with madwifi-ng here..." (-- Dan Williams)
***
"Almost every driver out there for Linux supports WEXT for the basics.
Madwifi probably supports these basic bits already; they include, for
example, SIOCGIWENCODE, SIOCSIWENCODE, pretty much _any_ ioctl that
starts with SIOC[S|G]IW is a WEXT one.
"So where madwifi has fallen behind a bit is in the enhancements that
WEXT has made in the past year or so, in both the WEXT-18 and WEXT-19
versions of the interface. First, WPA support has been added and
implemented by a few drivers, and other bits have been solidified. The
bits missing are likely the WPA bits where madwifi has it's own private
ioctls. It used to be that every driver had it's own method for setting
WPA parameters; but in the past year that has been standardised into
WEXT, and drivers now provide a WEXT-standard method for WPA."
(-- Dan Williams)
***
"No, madwifi needs to support Linux Wireless Extensions correctly, not
private ioctls that no other driver supports. We're not going to run
around supporting 50 different private driver APIs.
"That said, madwifi _did_ get Wireless Extensions 19 (needed for WPA)
support a few months ago. If you want WPA, or you want NetworkManager
to work with your driver, you need to use a fairly recent version of
madwifi, specifically madwifi-ng.
"The madwifi driver has only recently supported Wireless Extensions, the
standard driver API under Linux for configuring a wireless device. NM
requires that the device use WE. Some vendors patch NM to use the
wpa_supplicant 'madwifi' driver for compatibility with older versions of
madwifi, but that's not supported by the NetworkManager project itself."
(-- Dan Williams)
***
So you can see, Madwifi seems to be problematic - well, that describes
wireless in Linux in general, but that's mostly due to chipset vendor
who won't contribute to the Linux developer knowledge bas in as
meaningful way as they do to the M$ cause - so again, I suggest you're
probably going to get more help on one of the above developer ML's.
Yeah, it does look problematic...
That's why I am tickled to death that everything is working now!
Thanks again to all and Merry Christmas!
rbw
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