Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 374881
NetworkManager 0.7 breaks madwifi (and ath5k never worked)
Last modified: 2008-05-01 05:57:37 EDT
Description of problem: I have an Atheros card on a thinkpad X80. I used it with the madwifi driver since ath5k never worked for me (it scans but cannot associate). But with NM 0.7 also madwifi stops working, as the dhcp request are never answered. Notice that if I try to configure manually the card it does not work. The only solution is to disable Wireless in NM (by right-click on the icon) and then configure manually the device. Notice that a call to dhclient works if NM has Wireless disabled (but not if it is enabled)
I forgot to add that this holds true both with the latest stable version of madwifi and with the today's SVN version
I have the same issue on a Thinkpad T60 with AR5418 (DHCP will never associate). Interestingly enough, my configuration is different: I am using ndiswrapper on the AR5418 card.
Just a couple of precision. I have two thinkpad X40 (not X80, of course, it deos not exists), and I just came back from a conference tour in the States and can confirm that this problem persists with several different access points (hotel and four different conference networks). So the problem is neither related to the wifi-base (they were of different brands) nor to my laptop (unless both of them have broken configurations). The error message is usually this one: Jan 13 03:36:09 mirto NetworkManager: <info> Activation (wlan0/wireless): association took too long, failing activation.
I close this bug since now ath5k and NM work.