Gutsy and Atheros - now working

[Derek Broughton]

Mike Leone wrote:

> Turns out, both Derek and I were right.

Well, that seems like a good compromise :-)

> After it finishes, and boots for the first time, I see that it's telling
> me I am using an Atheros card, and that means it wants to load
> restricted drivers. "Hmm", I thought, "*that's* new - don't recall
> seeing that before".
...
> So what was different?
> 
> The first time I installed Gutsy, I had *only* the wireless card; I had
> no wired card inserted. This time, I did have both the wired and
> wireless cards inserted during installation. Dunno why it should have
> mattered, but apparently it did. 

I saw something probably similar, installing under feisty.  I ended up
plugging my computer directly into the router to get a decent install -
though the eth0 (wired) and eth1 (wireless) configurations in /etc/iftab
were still wrong (I just deleted them).

> What I do know is that it's now all Just Working, as I had hoped it
> would (and as I guess Derek expected it would). 

I can't say I "expected" it.  NM still has problems with some
configurations, but it's the tool that the Ubuntu developers have put their
time into, so one _hopes_ that it's going to work at least for
straightforward connections (and I did know that it supported WPA).

> So all that drama was 
> for nothing. :-)
> 
> One last thing that still annoys me is that KNetworkManager needs to
> prompt me for my KDE Wallet password, before it loads up support for the
> card and activates it, when I log in. Anyone know how to make that just
> load up without prompting me every time I log in?

No.  Living out in the sticks, and using TLS and HTTPS for anything
important, I never bothered to secure my wireless router.  I _am_ pretty
sure that it can be done (though most of what I remember about it is
getting the Gnome version to do the same thing).  It's got to do with
needing to access the gpg keyring to get your passphrase.  Try
googling "network manager kde gpg keyring".
> 
> In conclusion, everything is now working for me as it should, and it was
> all resolved with the classic Windows method - reinstall from scratch.

Ouch :-)
-- 
derek