airport (not extreme)

Architecture specific questions.

airport (not extreme)

Postby random guy » 30 Dec 2005, 02:21

first of all this is not an airport extreme or whatever, it is a regular one.

i think it is recognized more or less by linux because it does label the device "eth1 (airport)" (i think it is one)

also when i open the kiwifi program it shows an image of an network card but it says it doesnt detect wireless networks. (i know there is a network up too).

if someone has gotten their airport working could they please give me some guidance on how to configure it or whatever to get on a network. please help me, if i figure it out and know how to do it well i would definetly help others with the same problem but i need help getting to that level at the moment.
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Postby StarKnight83 » 30 Dec 2005, 14:54

try the "system-network-config" program
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Postby arborman113 » 30 Dec 2005, 17:33

I have eMac 700 OS 10.2.8 with airport (not extreme) card and partition with Linux installed from YDL 4.0.1 currently using Gnome desktop. The airport card works, at times I suck up free signal from the neighbors on the Mac partition, however I have a directly connected line from Comcast for internet now. I had some problems getting connected in YDL partition and learned a few things in the process.
First of all, the airport card can be turned on and off. In Mac partition, Applications -- Utilities -- AirPort Setup Assistant will come up with "Your AirPort card is turned off. Click OK to turn it on." (If that is the case). Possibly the card could be turned on and off from YDL partition but I would not know how to do it.
Once in YDL, with Gnome, the menu sequence: YDL (top left corner) -- System Settings -- Netwok conjures up the Network Configuration pane with tabs Devices, Hardware, DNS, and Hosts. You need to have or make a configuration that when Hardware tab is pecked produces Description: Airport, Type: wireless. This configuration has to be marked "active" and any others, if present "inactive". The configuration should have a name like "eth1". Save changes before or as you quit the Network Configuration pane and you may need to restart before they they take effect, I am not sure about that. If you do restart, a line like "bringing up interface eth1" should appear during the boot parade without producing a red marked error. Hopefully the right configuration will be working then.
Of course at some point you have to provide some information that allows connection to a wireless network but that is another issue.
When you post here it helps to provide some specific information about your computer, installation, etc.
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Postby random guy » 30 Dec 2005, 20:04

i didnt thnk more information than that would be nessesary, i am using YDL 4.0 and i have an Ibook G3 600 Mhz.

i open up the menu which i had already tried to get working before and i had several wirless ones in the devices tab because i tried different settings to try and find the one i needed. so i tried deleting all of those (which come back when i open the menu again but i guess that isnt important.)

when i try to activate the wirless connection it spends a little while tryin to determine the ip address but isnt able to. but in the hardware tab there are 2 connections listed.

airport - ethernet - eth1 - ok
apple airport - wireless - eth0 - configured

when i set up the wirless one i let it do everything automatically such as get ip by dhcp and determine the type of connection automatically.

any ideas?

EDIT: ah i realized that linux (unlike mac os or windows) does not prompt for network names or wep keys. you have to tell it what server to look for before you start it up. i edited the profile above which was mostly automatic configuration to tell it my wep key/network name. now it is working at least. thanks a lot for the help.
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Postby prh8 » 03 Jan 2006, 05:15

I have the same problem with network devices (eth1, eth2, etc.) that can't be deleted; or rather, each time I go to System Settings > Network, the devices I just deleted reappear again. I still haven't figured out how to get rid of them for good. Not a real big deal, I guess, just kind of annoying. I also get an error message during startup about an Ethernet port problem, presumably because I'm normally connected via wireless rather than the Ethernet port.

Getting the Airport card working in my iBook (900 MHz G3, YDL 4.01) was quite simple. And the Ethernet connection was a snap. I think I made a couple changes in the Edit menu for each device and then things just worked.
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Postby random guy » 03 Jan 2006, 21:24

i have been doing some research on these things since i got connected because i wanted to figure out more about how it worked. i think i saw somewhere a way to get them deleted but i will have to research google to find it (will do it later today when i finish some work), but ya it is not harmful even if you have multiple ones for the same device.

about your ethernet error messege does it happen during boot or during a wake up. because i have found that when i wake up from sleep while loged in as a user it doesnt get past waking up the ethernet connection, i have found that logging out before going to sleep will wake up fine.

by the way, this may or may not be usful for anyone (i found this when i was using gentoo ppc so i am not sure if this is an issue here) if you ethernet connect in middle of session and it doesnt recognize you connected it you can launch

# /etc/init.d/net.eth0 restart

as root and it should pick up.
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Postby prh8 » 04 Jan 2006, 05:35

I was told by one of the YDL people that there is a bug in the network software that results in not being able to permanently delete network devices (listed as "eth0", "eth1", etc.). The devices can be deleted using System Settings > Network, but they reappear the next time you open the app. Apparently there is no easy fix for this, but at least it's just an annoyance rather than a bad bug.

I only get an error message for my Ethernet port on boot, before the login window. This is almost certainly due to there being no Ethernet cable plugged in during normal operation (I'm always using the Airport card). In fact, during boot, the system makes a comment about checking the Ethernet cable, so the "error" must just be that the system doesn't detect any signal at that port.

I didn't know about the problem with Ethernet port not waking from sleep, but I know there is a problem with KDE not waking as well, at least with laptops. The solution is to always logout before closing the machine. Hopefully that will be something that gets fixed in the next release of YDL.
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Postby arborman113 » 05 Jan 2006, 23:32

A red error on boot can be due to the interface (or network device; are they the same?) being set to activate on boot for a physical device that is not on or connected. In the Network configuration pane select the item of interest, then peck the "Edit" button and see if the "Activate device when computer starts" item near the top of the resulting pane is checked. Changes here actually take. When installing, at least with Disk Druid, this is a selectable option for each interface. There are obviously some real problems with the network tool. Apparently devices or alias once made cannot be deleted, however with the "Hardware" tab selected hitting the "Delete" button seems to toss the device driver of the selected item. It would be nice to have a written explanation of profiles, logical devices, interfaces etc that applies to YDL; perhaps someone could write something up and stash it as an FAQ.
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Postby prh8 » 06 Jan 2006, 18:13

Thanks for the info. I do have the Ethernet port set to activate when booting, so that's clearly why the error shows up during startup. I set up the Ethernet device that way because I figured I'd eventually have the laptop plugged in to a wired network as well. I should probably go back and change that setting for now. Anyway, at least it's not causing any problems other than slowing down the startup.

I wonder if it's possible to delete unwanted devices for good using a terminal. I imagine that just about anything is possible using the command line if you know what you're doing, and that clearly doesn't include me. : )

One other thing; "random guy" mentioned using the kwifi manager. On my machine this doesn't seem to work at all. The little hourglass icon just spins for a minute or so and then the program quits without displaying anything else on the screen. I don't know what that's about. But the Network tool under System Settings works just fine for setting up my Airport card and Ethernet port. It was actually easier to set those up than it was in OS X, believe it or not.
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Postby StarKnight83 » 06 Jan 2006, 19:17

you can try launching the kwifi in a terminal (just open up a term app and type kwifi) and you should see some error messages
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Postby prh8 » 07 Jan 2006, 00:08

OK, how about this...I typed "kwifi" in Konsole. Here's what I got:

$ kwifi
bash: kwifi: command not found

???
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Postby prh8 » 10 Jan 2006, 07:17

An update:

the command to use in a terminal = "kwifimanager" at the prompt. I also had to install "wireless-tools" using yum in a terminal (as root). That still hasn't fixed the problems with KWifiManager in the GUI yet, however. Here's what I get at the command line when I try to start it that way:

$ kwifimanager
kwifimanager: error while loading shared libraries: libiw.so.26: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Hopefully I'll have all this figured out soon. As for the undeletable extra devices under System Settings > Network, apparently the bug can be bypassed by removing the offending devices directly from /etc/sysconfig/networking/ though I haven't tried it yet. It looks like the devices get deleted OK when you remove them, but the profiles don't.
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Postby StarKnight83 » 10 Jan 2006, 14:16

yeah under 3.x on my clamshells i found that deleting all devices and profiles then recreating it all solved a lot of problems linked to the networking devs
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Postby prh8 » 10 Jan 2006, 16:41

Any guess as to what the problem with kwifimanager continues to be? Using "yum install wireless-tools" was suggested by TerraSoft's people. But I'm continuing to see this error message:

$ kwifimanager
kwifimanager: error while loading shared libraries: libiw.so.26: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I'm pretty sure that ".so" means shared object (I was just reviewing some of this stuff the other night when looking for the mp3 support for Audacity, which I just installed). But I haven't figured out how to fix the problem yet.
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Postby prh8 » 12 Jan 2006, 04:55

Another update:

I got some assistance from the YDL people on the kwifimanager problem, which involved making a symlink from the missing library to an actual one: from libiw.so.26 to libiw.so.28. While this does get kwifimanager to start up in the GUI, it immediately crashes. Apparently this app needs an older version of libiw and can't deal with the new one even when symlinked. So I guess kwifimanager is a no-go in YDL 4.01.
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