WiFi Detection of and Use of Netgear WG311v2

I can conform this on Breezy and Dapper (Flight 5, will test daily CD image now...)

I am also having problems with my wg311v2 in dapper beta release. Worked fine in hoary and breezy. I can't connect to a wireless network at all....actually dapper doesn't even detect a wireless network with network manager or iwlist.

Can you indicate which driver/chipset your card uses?

I can also confirm. I have not ever (under BB or DD) gotten this to work without doing the following as root:

1. Install ndiswrapper and driver from netgear.
I fumbled through this, so I cannot recall the specifics.

2. rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.15-23-386/kernel/drivers/net/acx
This is from memory, so the path may be wrong.

3. depmod -a

Some updates magically "reinstall" the acx junk, borking my machine until I "fix" it again. Interestingly, depmod (without the -a flag, which is NOT documented in the man page), will cause it sometimes to boot, sometimes not. When booting in recovery mode from the grub screen, the wireless card seems to work even without depmod being run.

If I ever make the mistake of booting without the wireless networking fixed (i.e. it still tries to use acx), then it will hang for a very long time during boot. I do not know how long the timeout is, because I have always pulled the power from it. Interestingly, removing power seems to be the only way to regain control if it hangs at boot trying to use the acx driver. I cannot shutdown any other way.

Here is some info specific to the networking.
-------------------------------
lspci -v:

0000:00:08.0 Network controller: Texas Instruments ACX 111 54Mbps Wireless Interface
        Subsystem: Netgear: Unknown device 4c00
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 209
        Memory at ea020000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
        Memory at ea000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2

cat /proc/version:

Linux version 2.6.15-23-386 (buildd@rothera) (gcc version 4.0.3 (Ubuntu 4.0.3-1ubuntu5)) #1 PREEMPT Tue May 23 13:49:40 UTC 2006
-------------------------------

This ACX thing seems to affect people in different ways, but some seem to share this problem with wg11v2, where it *never* "just works."

If I can help in any way, please let me know.

I posted the same bug, resolving the problem e loading the right firmware...
If you want you can see here:

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/46873

The firmware solution fixed my problem as well. In fact, when the default firmware is loaded, the following message is put in /var/log/messages:

Jun 14 05:26:20 localhost kernel: [4323118.020000] acx: firmware 'Rev 2.3.1.31' does not work well with this driver

Ok, the firmware knows its incompatible, so why does Ubuntu use it?

Well it happened again! Tonight (6-16-6), Ubuntu installed a bunch of updates which left me with an unbootable machine (after suggesting that I reboot).

The firmware hack fixed the problem, but why does this happen? When the module acx gets loaded, it clearly says it isn't compatible.

What gives?

Try adding this line to /etc/modprobe.d/options

options acx firmware_ver=1.2.0.30

Replace 1.2.0.30 with the firmware version that works for you.

Putting that line in the options file worked! Hopefully this will persist across upgrades.

Many thanks.

On Sat, 2006-06-17 at 15:06 +0000, martyscholes wrote:
> Putting that line in the options file worked! Hopefully this will
> persist across upgrades.

Please, please, PLEASE! This is not a final solution. If this works for
you, then do send the info described in /lib/firmware/`uname
-r`/acx/readme.txt so that others can benefit without having to go
through this.

(This has nothing to do with linux-wlan-ng)

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!