Lan Barnes wrote:
First, thank you Jim, Gus, and Carl (and Robert for moral support) for the
help yesterday on this. I'm still stuck, but I feel smarter.
Here's where I am. I reinstalled the machine w/ Fedora 8. The wireless
still doesn't work. Jim and I established at the installfest to our own
satisfaction that the machine's card is OK. We concluded that there was a
probable version incompatability between the kernel and the card module as
it was installed on Saturday.
I went to F8 following Gus's advice that it has much better wireless
support. I now believe he's right. I suspect I'm stuck right now in a
configuration ignorance. Presumably, F8 is all compatable already.
The machine is a "Great Quality NX-L515." That they have to call
themselves "Great Quality" should concern us all.
F8 is installed. /lib/firmware has all the correct rt*.bin files, so that
much looks healthy.
I am attaching a long text file with the results of every command I could
think of that might help the knowledgable. I stand ready to run other
commands that you send to me. With any kind of luck, we can lick this
thing over the list. However, if it takes it, I can bag it up and travel
to someone's home for hands-on troubleshooting. Let's consider that a last
resort.
<grin> I'm over here asking for a digital barn raising. How did people
live before mailing lists? (I can answer that -- in isolation.)
How did wlan0 get its ip address? Did you statically assign it or does
it get it through dhcp? If the ip address is statically assigned, the
module will still show it's up even if it did not initialize properly.
Sometimes the dhclient will reuse an old lease also.
Even though the module loads it may still not be loading the firmware
properly. The first step is to properly identify the card, despite what
the /etc/sysconfig/hwconf says. Run lspci -v and see what it says for
the wireless card and make sure it matches.
Next boot the computer into single mode. Once there, check if the
rt61pci module gets loaded. It probably will because of udev. If that is
the case, you must blacklist the module. Edit the file
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add the rt61pci module to the list. Reboot
into single mode and check again to make sure is does not load. If the
module is not loaded, load it using modprobe and see if it gives you any
error messages. You also need to look in dmesg to see if there were any
problems. Unfortunately, Red Hat didn't compile the module with debug
support which could have helped.
Finally, where did you get the firmware files for the card? My default
install of Fedora 8 does NOT have the firmware for the rt61pci card.
Using "modinfo rt61pci" shows that you should have three firmware files:
rt2661.bin, rt2561s.bin and rt2561.bin. The rt2x00 wiki says to get the
firmware from the RaLink site <http://www.ralinktech.com> or from the MS
Windows driver disk shipped with the machine.
More info is found on the rt2x00 wiki
<http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php?title=Rt2x00_README>
Gus
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
