Wireless (madwifi) with wpa_supplicant freezes kernel

[Wafa Hakim Orman]

Hi,

Was wondering if anyone else has had this problem, & if yes what they
did about it.

I'm running Kubuntu Feisty on a Toshiba Satellite laptop with a new
Netgear WG115T wireless card that uses the Atheros chipset and Madwifi
driver, both of which are _supposed_ to work seamlessly on Ubuntu. I
bought the new wireless card because my old one, a Motorola with
Broadcom chipset that needed ndiswrapper, could not work with my new
workplace's dynamic WEP wireless with EAP/MSCHAPV2 authentication.
(The card could, but only in Windows -- ndiswrapper, from everything I
read, could not work with wpa_supplicant using dynamic WEP, and did
not work with xsupplicant at all.)

Now, having installed the new driver, I've been having a series of
problems & am _still_ unable to use the wireless here. It works on
Windows so I know this is not a hardware issue.

The problems started when I tried to get Network Manager to use the
dynamic WEP, but the interface only allowed WPA or static WEP. So I
uninstalled Network Manager & replaced it with kwlan. My
wpa_supplicant.conf has already been set up for the network; I just
wanted a GUI to save me time when logging in. But kwlan almost
inevitably caused the kernel to freeze, & nothing but a power-off &
reboot would work. I googled the problem & it was suggested that
people try the 386 kernel & not the generic kernel, since the generic
was known to have issues. However, I never had the generic kernel --
mine was always the 386. (I checked.) In addition, I had also
uninstalled ndiswrapper, blacklisted it to be safe, & uninstalled the
Broadcom drivers (& installed the madwifi drivers, to be safe.)

Finally I got so sick of it I uninstalled kwlan, leaving only the
command-line wpa_supplicant. But now even that doesn't work. Merely
starting up the laptop with the wireless card in it is enough to cause
the kernel to freeze. It always freezes anyway if I dare to insert the
wireless card while the computer is on.


Does anyone know what is going on, & what I could do to fix it?


Thanks in advance,

Wafa.


-- 
"So be it."
                  --Kurt Vonnegut