Hi everyone, i'm i new user of Zenwalk and Linux systems.
I've got an old notebook and i enjoied a lot using for a few time Zenwalk 5.2 (Pentium III 600MHz, 320MB of RAM)
In order to connect to my wifi net i bought, when I was still using Windows XP, a PCMCIA Wi-Fi cardbus TP-LINK TL_WN510G an with that OS i never worked, so i abandoned ant hope.
When I re-started using this laptop with others distro as Ubuntu or Xubuntu the wifi card worked since the first plugging with no need to do something else (except a restart).
With Zenwalk 5.2 I installed XP drivers using ndiswrapper and it worked. Then I updated Skype through netpkg and the apocalypse happened: wicd died and so did neptkg.
I installed the new Zenwalk 6.0, in the hope this problem was solved but now I'm in this situation:
Wicd find my wireless lan but does not connect to it (the WPA passphrase is correct)
I think the pcmcia wifi card is Atheros based, as it's written on its box and, maybe, it's a 5005g chipset, as I read in a forum.

May anyone help me, please?

Thanks
Fabbro

You can try to use ndiswrapper again.
Open a Terminal and become root with "su". Then enter the following:
lsmod | grep ath

Depending if ath5k or ath9k was in the output open the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist (e.g. geany <path>) and add the following line at the end:

or


Then reboot or enter modprobe -r ath5k or modprobe ath9k again depending on what was in the output of lsmod and finally configure ndiswrapper. After a reboot you might need to change some wicd settings so that ndiswrapper is used and it should work.

thanks a lot for the very fast reply

But I can't go on to the end:

lsmod | grep ath doesen't give any result,
so i typed lsmod:
Module Size Used by
button 3600 0
battery 6532 0
ndiswrapper 117396 0
rtc 3992 0
iptable_mangle 1408 0
iptable_nat 2564 0
nf_nat 8980 1 iptable_nat
nf_conntrack_ipv4 6156 3 iptable_nat,nf_nat
nf_conntrack 28728 3 iptable_nat,nf_nat,nf_conntrack_ipv4
nf_defrag_ipv4 1024 1 nf_conntrack_ipv4
iptable_filter 1280 0
ip_tables 6544 3 iptable_mangle,iptable_nat,iptable_filter
x_tables 6404 2 iptable_nat,ip_tables
video 11408 0
output 1280 1 video
lp 5452 0
fuse 31004 2
fan 2176 0
pcmcia 19988 0
snd_es1938 10628 1
gameport 5132 2 snd_es1938
snd_pcm 34820 1 snd_es1938
snd_page_alloc 4360 1 snd_pcm
i2c_ali1535 4228 0
snd_opl3_lib 5504 1 snd_es1938
snd_timer 11016 2 snd_pcm,snd_opl3_lib
snd_hwdep 3588 1 snd_opl3_lib
snd_mpu401_uart 3328 1 snd_es1938
snd_rawmidi 10496 1 snd_mpu401_uart
snd_seq_device 3340 2 snd_opl3_lib,snd_rawmidi
i2c_ali15x3 4484 0
ohci_hcd 15120 0
snd 26296 10 snd_es1938,snd_pcm,snd_opl3_lib,snd_timer,snd_hwdep,snd_mpu401_uart,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device
i2c_core 10516 2 i2c_ali1535,i2c_ali15x3
soundcore 3016 1 snd
eepro100 17808 0
mii 2816 1 eepro100
parport_pc 22972 1
ali_agp 3072 1
thermal 10012 0
parport 19412 2 lp,parport_pc
ac 2308 0
agpgart 16436 1 ali_agp
processor 28844 1 thermal
shpchp 20372 0
rfkill 3888 0
pci_hotplug 15776 1 shpchp
yenta_socket 14988 2
joydev 6080 0
rsrc_nonstatic 6400 1 yenta_socket
led_class 1668 0
pcmcia_core 17812 3 pcmcia,yenta_socket,rsrc_nonstatic
sg 15412 0
evdev 5380 5
wmi 3496 0

Then, a friend of mine suggested me to type modprobe -r ath5k
or ath9k
but nothing changed

what to do?

Well, you're using yet ndiswrapper, right?

yes

Can you check the wicd preferences and if not yet, change wpa supplicant driver to ndiswrapper.
Also what's entered for wireless interface and what's the output of iwconfig (as root).

So:

the driver wpa supplicant was set to wext and i changed into ndiswrapper; but before doing this wicd failed in the autentication phase, while now it stops few istants after i click on the connect button.

Wireless interface is wlan0

iwconfig shows this:

fabrizio[~]$ su

Password:

root[fabrizio]# iwconfig

lo no wireless extensions.


eth0 no wireless extensions.


wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any

Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz
Access Point: Not-Associated

Bit Rate:54 Mb/s

Encryption key:off

Power Management:off

Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0

Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0

Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0


root[fabrizio]#

Ndiswrapper is still properly configured?
Can you give us your wireless lspci (exec lspci as root) line.

Ndiswrapper has the same loaded driver: the card's led are corectly lighting

The response to lspci is:

fabrizio[~]$ su
Password:
root[fabrizio]# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: ALi Corporation M1621 (rev 05)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ALi Corporation PCI to AGP Controller (rev 01)
00:06.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9/0/1 Ethernet Pro 100 (rev 08)
00:06.1 Serial controller: Agere Systems LT WinModem
00:07.0 ISA bridge: ALi Corporation M1533/M1535/M1543 PCI to ISA Bridge [Aladdin IV/V/V+] (rev 0a)
00:08.0 Multimedia audio controller: ESS Technology ES1969 Solo-1 Audiodrive (rev 02)
00:0f.0 IDE interface: ALi Corporation M5229 IDE (rev 20)
00:11.0 Bridge: ALi Corporation M7101 Power Management Controller [PMU] (rev 09)
00:13.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ6812 CardBus Controller (rev 05)
00:14.0 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Trident Microsystems Cyber 9525 (rev 49)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR2413 802.11bg NIC (rev 01)
root[fabrizio]#

may anyone help me, please?

Well, all I can still suggest is:
Revise the procedure another time and look for a fault, if you find none try to start another time from the beginning, if that doesn't help either and you did everything right, your chip is probably not supported.

You could also google for instructions, maybe you don't even need ndiswrapper and there's a native driver.

I can't believe it: I have found no solution yet.
So, what to do?
In this moment the problem is in this way:
installed madwifi drivers by the guide http://wiki.zenwalk.org/index.php?title ... g_(Atheros)
the pcmcia wlan card is correctly recognized and I can see wifi networks in Wicd Network manager.
My router is WPA2 protected: when I try to connect it fails. I changed the WPA Supplicant into madfidi but nothing happened.
May anyone help me please?