Installing driver for WiFi adapter

[mike cloaked]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 3:28 PM, John W. Linville <linville at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 11:36:06PM +0100, Paul Smith wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 9:30 PM, Paul Smith <phhs80 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>> >> TP-LINK TL-WN821N
>> >>> >
>> >>> >
>> >>> > Can you post output of lsmod and lsusb. Have you installed the firmware
>> >>> > for the device into /lib/firmware?  If the device is supported by the
>> >>> > kernel you won't be able to load the module without the firmware
>> >>> > installed.
>> >>> >
>> >>> > Google is your friend.
>> >>>
>> >>> Thanks, Terry.
>> >>
>> >> Why do you believe you need to install some kind of a driver? From the
>> >> below, it looks like your card is an atheros chip-based one, and you have a
>> >> bunch of ath9 modules loaded.
>> >>
>> >> What exactly is or is not working for you.
>> >
>> > Well, I plug the the USB device and nothing happens. According to the
>> > manual, a led should be turned on when I plug the USB.
>>
>> A possible explanation is here:
>>
>> http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=268068
>
> That relates to the carl9170 driver.  We don't have that firmware
> packaged in Fedora either -- no one ever bothered to review my
> package of the SH cross compiler used to build the firmware, and I
> haven't bothered to bang the drum about it either.  Anyway, that's
> a different issue.
>
> The ath9k_htc firmware used to be in the linux-firmware tree, but
> apparently they have stopped updating it there?  Not sure...
>
> Anyway, you can find the firmware and get it installed by starting
> here:
>
>        http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/ath9k_htc#Firmware
>
> Hth!
>
> John

I also have a machine that has to use an external usb wifi adapter and
in my case I have a tiny device that relies on rtl8712su or rtl8192su
- which is a slight aside from the thread on ath9k...but similar issue
in that there is no wireless driver by default.

Until f14/15 I was able to compile the driver from the source from
realtek - and copy the firmware to /lib/firmware and it would work
fine - however I recently installed f16 alpha rc5 and updated via
ether - but the wireless driver won't compile - (yes I have
kernel-devel and kernel-headers).

I could give the output of lsusb and other diagnostics but I wonder if
anyone else has had a similar issue with f16a ?  Any tips for
rtl8712/8192 for usb would be appreciated.

-- 
mike c