Orinoco Gold 8470-WD on CF4

[Glenn Meyer]

Hello,

Can someone please help with how to set up this wireless card on FC4?  I 
would like to run Kismet.  I've read and gathered that this is the most 
desirable card (in many opinions - I'm sure not all), but it also looks 
to be one of the most difficult to set up.  All of the instructions I've 
found are for an older card with the Hermes chips.  I believe mine has 
the Atheros (from the model number).

Any help sure would be appreciated.  Thank you.

[SternData]

Glenn Meyer wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Can someone please help with how to set up this wireless card on FC4?  I 
> would like to run Kismet.  I've read and gathered that this is the most 
> desirable card (in many opinions - I'm sure not all), but it also looks 
> to be one of the most difficult to set up.  All of the instructions I've 
> found are for an older card with the Hermes chips.  I believe mine has 
> the Atheros (from the model number).
>
> Any help sure would be appreciated.  Thank you.

To get an Atheros chipset card working, compile yourself a copy of MadWiFi.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/madwifi/

[Andy Oram]

I was not going to comment on the Atheros because I haven't
pursued it to the bitter end, but I got to the point of
running "make modules" on the MadWifi driver and got the
message that uudecode was required. (I got to the same point
on Ubuntu Warty before giving up.) I figured that if the
build procedure required an obsolete email package, who
knows what other weirdness would turn up along the way. But
I suspect that uudecode is present on these distributions
and that a look through makefiles and scripts might find a
fix.

Andy

[SternData]

Andy Oram wrote:
> I was not going to comment on the Atheros because I haven't
> pursued it to the bitter end, but I got to the point of
> running "make modules" on the MadWifi driver and got the
> message that uudecode was required. (I got to the same point
> on Ubuntu Warty before giving up.) I figured that if the
> build procedure required an obsolete email package, who
> knows what other weirdness would turn up along the way. But
> I suspect that uudecode is present on these distributions
> and that a look through makefiles and scripts might find a
> fix.

I can't recall right now which package provides uuencode, but installing 
that and using MadWiFi saved me from having to throw away an otherwise 
useful nic.

[Andy Oram]

Thanks for the encouragement. The package is sharutils. I'm
downloading it now. (I did hope to push forward the
knowledge of the readers by my posting, not just to
complain.)

Andy

[David Cary Hart]

On Sat, 2005-07-30 at 16:17 -0400, Andy Oram wrote:
> Thanks for the encouragement. The paokage is sharutils. I'm
> downloading it now. (I did hope to push forward the
> knowledge of the readers by my posting, not just to
> complain.)
>
> Andy

An alternative to MadWiFi is ndiswrapper which facilitates the use of
Windows drivers. Having used both on Atheros for some time, I get VASTLY
improved performance with ndiswrapper (YMMV). Ndiswrapper is available
from the Dag repo. The source and docs are here:
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

[SternData]

David Cary Hart wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-07-30 at 16:17 -0400, Andy Oram wrote:
> > Thanks for the encouragement. The paokage is sharutils. I'm
> > downloading it now. (I did hope to push forward the
> > knowledge of the readers by my posting, not just to
> > complain.)
> >
> > Andy
>
> An alternative to MadWiFi is ndiswrapper which facilitates the use of
> Windows drivers. Having used both on Atheros for some time, I get VASTLY
> improved performance with ndiswrapper (YMMV). Ndiswrapper is available
> from the Dag repo. The source and docs are here:
> http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

Unfortunately, when I tried ndiswrapper with the D-Link card, I kept 
finding new and interesting ways to crash the kernel.

[David Cary Hart]

On Sun, 2005-07-31 at 09:36 -0500, Steven Stern wrote:
> David Cary Hart wrote:
> > An alternative to MadWiFi is ndiswrapper which facilitates the use of
> > Windows drivers. Having used both on Atheros for some time, I get VASTLY
> > improved performance with ndiswrapper (YMMV). Ndiswrapper is available
> > from the Dag repo. The source and docs are here:
> > http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/
>
> Unfortunately, when I tried ndiswrapper with the D-Link card, I kept 
> finding new and interesting ways to crash the kernel.

I use a vanilla kernel with 8k stacks for ndiswrappers. Then I added
netprofile=wireless to the grub command line for that kernel after
setting up the "wireless" profile.

YMMV but I have found that the performance is is astonishingly better
than I get with madwifi.

[Solved!] Orinoco Gold 8470-WD on FC4

[Glenn Meyer]

This site has lots of good help on MadWiFi on Red Hat...
http://madwifi.sourceforge.net/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=redhat

But the link at the very bottom of that page is specificall for FC4 and 
was exactly what I needed....
http://www.marcanoonline.com/wiki/Installing_Madwifi_on_Fedora_Core_with_WPA

That link gave me all I needed including RPMs, instructions, etc.

Thank you all for your suggestions and advice.

Andy Oram wrote:
> I was not going to comment on the Atheros because I haven't
> pursued it to the bitter end, but I got to the point of
> running "make modules" on the MadWifi driver and got the
> message that uudecode was required. (I got to the same point
> on Ubuntu Warty before giving up.) I figured that if the
> build procedure required an obsolete email package, who
> knows what other weirdness would turn up along the way. But
> I suspect that uudecode is present on these distributions
> and that a look through makefiles and scripts might find a
> fix.
>
> Andy