I am having some difficulty getting a
Netgear WNDA3100 USB WiFi dongle working.
According to the documentation (see links below) the Open Source drivers are in the 2.6.30 kernel but Fedora won't see that kernel for some time (F11 is 2.6.29). So the first fool suggesting I upgrade to a newer release should... well, I won't say what they should do but the point is that a solution for getting this WiFi dongle working should work in F9 - F11 (perhaps even F8 as well).
My system details are: Fedora 9 using a 2.6.27.21-78.2.41 kernel on an i686 machine.
dmesg | less output shows:
Code:
usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0846, idProduct=9010
usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=16, Product=32, SerialNumber=48
usb 2-1: Product: USB2.0 WLAN
usb 2-1: Manufacturer: ATHER
usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 12345
lsusb output shows:
Code:
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0846:9010 NetGear, Inc. WNDA3100 RangeMax Dual Band Wireless-N [Atheros AR9001U-2NX]
From this output I assume that the WiFi dongle is using an
Atheros AR9001U-2NX chip.
I also assume that the Linux driver for this chip is the
ar9170 driver
OR
one could use the
otus driver.
As I understand it there exist two possible ways to get the WiFi dongle working;
a) using open source drivers ar9170 or otus and madwifi,
or
b) using M$ drivers and ndiswrapper.
I hope I have that correct from all my reading....
I've attempted to use the madwifi route but managed to hose that up pretty good so if someone knows how to do it correctly it would be nice to know the proper execution for using this method.
After hosing the madwifi route I tried the ndiswrapper route but with no success for several reasons. I've downloaded the M$ driver from Netgear but for some reason using cabextract and unshield I cannot extract the .inf and .sys files from it. I did find links to the M$ drivers
here and
here, HOWEVER, these versions of the driver are ridiculously out of date (pre 1.6 and hence > 2 yrs ago) and DO NOT support
most of the WiFi dongles capabilities
even in M$ whether XP or Vista. It's not until driver version 1.6 and 1.7 where most of the capabilities work.
So, if someone knows how to hack the drivers from the exe file from Netgear I'd love to hear about the method used. Afterward I could then try to use the ndiswrapper method of getting the WiFi dongle to work. I'll need help in that area since there seems to be conflicting advice in other forums as to the correct procedure. Although I'm guessing the reason why this method's not working in these other forums is due to the use of extremely outdated driver files that don't support the functions of the WiFi dongles chip.
btw, I did notice
this thread on the same WiFi dongle but couldn't follow it as a) I don't have the M$ drivers to use the ndiswrapper method and b) recompiling kernels on a regular basis is not an option.
Linear Mode
