Gutsy Wireless Woes on a PowerBook

[Michael Bach (gmx)]

Jeff Yowell wrote:
> I have a G4 aluminum PowerBook with an Atheros wireless cardbus setup  
> (Netgear card).  Ever since Dapper, I have had almost non-existent  
> and at best flaky wireless.
> I just installed Gutsy hoping that this time around, the drivers  
> would have been improved on.  No such luck.
> 
> I have figured out that sometimes, if I shove the card in just after  
> login, the card will be picked up and I connect wirelessly.  But  
> that's hit and miss.  Works maybe 30% of the time.
> 
> I have installed ndiswrapper and Madwifi to no avail.
> 
> Anyone out there have similar hardwire that could help?
> 

For the atheros chipsets, they fall into the category of restricted 
drivers. In "Control Center"->"System Administration"->"Restricted 
Drivers" you should at least see the ahteros hardware layer checked ("in 
use").

For configuration, it seems the ubuntu team is favoring the 
network-manager tool. this framework has, under kubuntu 7.10, two kde 
frontends with different names but essentially same binaries (so I 
understand):
old: knetworkmanager
new: network-manager-kde (this is probably installed on your system).

Now, the hook with the network-manager on ubuntu is, that they require 
the /etc/network/interfaces NOT(!) to configure any network-interface. 
Apart from the loopback, this file has no content:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

This should be (with the exception of comments) the entire content of 
/etc/network/interfaces. So comment out any other network configuration.
After this, restart the dbus daemon by /etc/init.d/dbus restart.
If it hasn't happened automatically, start the kde-app, 
"Internet"->"KNetworkManager"

I have found the bits on configuration on a blog [1] (unfortunately in 
German), from my experience with 7.10 on a laptop, I can confirm the 
above procedure to be working. References in [1] point the 
network-manger FAQs [2].

[1] http://mylinux.suzansworld.com/?p=175
[2] http://live.gnome.org/DarrenAlbers/NetworkManagerFAQ

Mike