Suse wireless help

[SleepWalkerX]

I have an acx111 card and apparently Suse has the firmware for the card and supplies a driver called acx_pci. It seems to be up to date. It detects my card too. When I go to Yast and select the card I can even set my wireless card settings and try to enable it.

The problem is that I can't go online though. And when I type ifconfig or iwconfig it only detects two ethernet ports, eth0 and eth1, (i do have two ethernet ports) and sit0 (which is not my card, something to do with ipv6 maybe). So what's up? How can Yast detect my card and try to make it work while ifconfig/iwconfig doesn't detect anything?

 

[drag]

The suse yast tool is goofing up then. Once the module is loaded correctly it should pop up on ifconfig and iwconfig will show wireless extensions for that card. (that's the way it's suppose to work at least)

There are some commands for handling modules.
lsmod lists the loaded drivers.
modprobe module-name will load the module.
rmmod will remove the module.

So see if the module is loaded..
lsmod | grep acx_pci

If it's loaded..
rmmod acx_pci

If it's not loaded, or it's been removed load it:
modprobe acx_pci

Then check the kernel comments output and see what it says.
dmesg

It should say something about loading the acx_pci module, comment something on the device name or give a error when it fails to bring up the interface. If everything worked correctly then you should be able to see the new interface with ifconfig and iwconfig.

If that works then you just need to make sure the module will be aviable next time you reboot. I think that suse uses a /etc/modules file for you to stick modules that you want to make sure get loaded up at boot time, but I am not sure. (see man modules) Put that acx_pci in there. It may change the order of the eth0, eth1, etc etc numbers though if acx_pci module shows the wireless interface up as a ethX device.. so watch out for that.

edit:
It maybe that suse has the driver mixed up. There is also a acx100_pci

edit2:
Also I beleive these are TI-based chipsets in these wireless drivers. The Linux driver is reversed engineered and maybe flaky.. there is no support from TI and there is no documentation aviable for the kernel developers.

Texas Instruments does support using NDIS (windows XP wireless driver) in Linux using the Linuxant ndis wrapper-based driver. However this costs money. But it's aviable for you to use.

There is a no-cost ndiswrapper that you can use in lue of paying for linuxant, but that can be iffy and difficult to setup. There will be directions online for stuff to use.

 

[bersl2]

[insert obligatory jab at TI]
[insert obligatory recommendation to use a Ralink- or Atheros-based product]

 

[drag]

oops

 

[SleepWalkerX]

acx_pci: module not supported by Novell, setting U taint flag.
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:09.0[A] -> Link [LNK2] -> GSI 5 (level, low) -> IRQ 5
ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:01:09.0 disabled
acx_pci: probe of 0000:01:09.0 failed with error -5

This is what I get when I rmmod acx_pci and modprobe it. Maybe I should try to recompile a copy of the acx100 driver. Or I can just use Ndiswrapper, I'll try both right now.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Yay, thanks Drag, its up with Ndiswrapper. It appears to have been a faulty driver. I can't seem to find modules.dep though. I only see modprobe.conf. Is that where I can add ndiswrapper so it'll load on startup?