On Tuesday, 27. March 2012. 10.02.25 Arun Khan wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 10:05 PM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Yesterday I managed to find a driver for my USB wireless dongle, and it is
> > now correctly recognized by the kernel. However, I don't know how to
> > configure it.
> How did you install the driver that you found?
Basically, I did this (following the advice of Ned Slider, from another
thread):
# yum --enablerepo=elrepo-testing kmod-compat-wireless
# modprobe usb8xxx
Namely, on the http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-compat-wireless there is a list of
drivers corresponding to various devices. My device is
# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 1286:1fab Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. 88W8338
[Libertas] 802.11g
so I did a search on the site for "1286" and found two relevant modules,
usb8xxx and libertas. Modprobe-ing usb8xxx loads the following:
# lsmod
Module Size Used by
usb8xxx 13926 0
libertas 105931 1 usb8xxx
libertas_tf 12514 0
mac80211 234108 1 libertas_tf
cfg80211 164625 2 libertas,mac80211
rfkill 15242 1 cfg80211
compat 16607 2 mac80211,cfg80211
lib80211 4194 1 libertas
When I plug in the device, /var/log/messages says:
Mar 27 08:10:30 CicaMaca kernel: usb 1-2: new high speed USB device using
ehci_hcd and address 7
Mar 27 08:10:31 CicaMaca kernel: usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1286,
idProduct=1fab
Mar 27 08:10:31 CicaMaca kernel: usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1,
Product=2, SerialNumber=0
Mar 27 08:10:31 CicaMaca kernel: usb 1-2: Product: 54M USB Wireless NIC
Mar 27 08:10:31 CicaMaca kernel: usb 1-2: Manufacturer: Tenda..
Mar 27 08:10:31 CicaMaca kernel: usb 1-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
which is basically the same information as found in dmesg. The device is
correctly recognized, as far as it goes.
> What is the output of "/sbin/ifconfig -a" does it list the wifi
> device i.e. wlan0 ?
No, ifconfig lists only my two wired ethernet devices (eth0, eth1), and the
openvpn virtual ethernet device (tap0). No mention of anything wireless.
> Do "ethtool --driver <iface> " to find the driver associated with
> your wifi network interface.
What should <iface> be? There isn't one associated to the wireless NIC, or I
am unable to find it. I tried the following methods:
# ifconfig -a
# lshw -C network
# rfkill list
# iwconfig
None of these report anything except my three wired devices (if at all).
I vaguely understand that all these utilities are querrying the kernel for the
info about hardware, but the kernel does not seem to be exposing it (or
requires some non-automatic initialization). I tried looking at various places
under /proc (to see if I can read something manually), but I found nothing,
and TBH I don't quite know where to look.
> Usuall the NetworkManager detects all the active network interfaces
> and presents the devices. In your case, I suspect the wifi device is
> not being initialized.
The NetworkManager does indeed give "some" indication that there is a wireless
device, but it doesn't tell much. When I do a "service NetworkManager
restart", this is the only relevant thing I recognized about wireless from
/var/log/messages:
Mar 27 08:24:24 CicaMaca NetworkManager[30454]: <info> WiFi enabled by radio
killswitch; enabled by state file
Mar 27 08:24:24 CicaMaca NetworkManager[30454]: <info> WWAN enabled by radio
killswitch; enabled by state file
Mar 27 08:24:24 CicaMaca NetworkManager[30454]: <info> WiMAX enabled by radio
killswitch; enabled by state file
Mar 27 08:24:24 CicaMaca NetworkManager[30454]: <info> Networking is enabled
by state file
Everything else is about eth0, eth1 and tap0 devices. I can provide full logs
if you think I missed something.
I am almost out of patience with this, and I'm already considering buying
another wireless card, or rather a wireless router which can act as a client
to another wireless router, so that I can connect the computer via wired
ethernet. I'd prefer not to waste any money on this, especially if it is just
a software configuration issue, but I also need the damn thing to start working
sooner than later.
Btw, the device is working properly under Windows, and it used to work
properly under Linux with ndiswrapper. But current ndiswrapper fails to work
(or even fails to compile) on current CentOS, so my only option is to try a
native Linux driver from kmod-compat-wireless.
If there is any way to make this work without throwing money at the problem,
I'd appreciate to know. Also, if there isn't a way to make it work (in the
next couple of days), I'd appreciate to know that as well. In that case, can
you recommend any wireless device for a desktop machine which would work
painlessly under CentOS? There might be a small chance I can buy it somewhere.
Thanks for helping out! :-)
Best, :-)
Marko
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