9 thoughts on - CentOS 7 Does Not Pick Up My Atheros Wireless

• I suspect the driver your device uses is one of those removed from CentOS-7. To find out if this is the case, we need to know the device ID pairing. Please show us the output from:

  lspci -nn | grep -i eth

  The driver could be ath5k. If so, you are in luck. The CentOSplus kernel has that driver. But we will see..

  Akemi

• Greetings everyone.

  I the output of lspci -nn | grep -i eth is identical to lspci |grep AR which has already been listed.

  From my understanding, I need ath5k, and I do in fact require CentOSplus kernel.

  I have attempted to update to CentOSplus kernel by doing the following:

  run vi /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo and add the following to it

  [CentOSplus]
  enabled=1
  includepkgs=kernel*

  However, this only made kernel-plus packages avaialable, and none of which provide nl80211 or ath5k resources.

  Can some current directions be listed on how I am supposed to get the CentOSplus kernel?

  Respectfully,

  Martes G Wigglesworth

  —– Original Message —

• http://wiki.CentOS.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/CentOSPlus

  I also see “exclude=” directives on that webpage that you didn’t mention in your message.

• Greetings everyone.

  I just had to remove the base kernel, and install kernel-plus, then restart.

  i.e. “yum -y remove kernel* && yum -y install kernel-plus*”

  I now see the wireless-n card in ifconfig -a :

  wlp8s5: flags@98 mtu 1500
  ether 00:1b:2f:37:02:46 txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
  RX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0 B)
  RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
  TX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0 B)
  TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0

  Thanks again.

  Respectfully,

  Martes G Wigglesworth

  —– Original Message —

• You do not have to uninstall kernel. The distro kernel and kernel-plus can coexist on the system. But if you want to keep using kernel-plus, edit the /etc/sysconfig/kernel file to make it the default:

  DEFAULTKERNEL=kernel-plus

  Akemi

• Now that you’ve got things going, this is a mute point but I just wanted to make one point clear for future searchers. Your output:

  lspci |grep AR
  08:05.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR5212/AR5213 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)

  is not the same as what I asked for. Look very closely. ‘lspci -nn’
  displays the device IDs in the output, for example [8086:107c]. This information is important and can be used to identify the driver that supports the device.

  Akemi

• For brevity, here is the output that you requested earlier.

  [@imaginationland ~]$ lspci -nn |grep -i eth
  08:05.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Qualcomm Atheros AR5212/AR5213 Wireless Network Adapter [168c:0013] (rev 01)
  0b:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [10ec:8168] (rev 09)

  Here is the original output.

  [@imaginationland ~]$ lspci |grep AR
  08:05.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR5212/AR5213 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)

  Not really sure what the hash provides us, when investigating what version of Atheros drivers we need, however, you are correct, the output was not exactly the same.

  Thanks for the assistance on this.

  Respectfully,

  Martes G Wigglesworth

  —– Original Message —

• Right, there is an important difference. That is, the ‘lspci -nn’
  command shows the device ID pairing. In this case it is [168c:0013]
  for your atheros adapter.

  If you remember, I made a *guess* early on that the driver might be ath5k. I could have found this info easily had I known the device IDs.

  Using the ID pairing 168c and 0013, I would run this command on my c7 system:

  $ grep -i 168c /lib/modules/*/modules.alias | grep -i 0013
  /lib/modules/3.10.0-123.8.1.el7.CentOS.plus.x86_64/modules.alias:alias pci:v0000168Cd00000013sv*sd*bc*sc*i* ath5k
  /lib/modules/3.16.1-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64/modules.alias:alias pci:v0000168Cd00000013sv*sd*bc*sc*i* ath5k

  This system has a CentOS kernel, CentOSPlus kernel and kernel-ml (from ELRepo). The output shows:

  (1) the device is supported by ath5k
  (2) ath5k is included in the CentOSplus kernel and kernel-ml but NOT
  in the CentOS distro kernel.

  Hope this info helps,

  Akemi

• Great recap Akemi.

  I guess I am also a bit familiar with this stuff, however, since I haven’t had to worry about “drivers” since moving to linux and not using BSD on the desktop for quite a few years now.

  I asked on NovaLug list first, since I had trouble posting to this list, and someone pointed out the ath5k driver.

  I couldn’t remember the driver name, since I haven’t had to for like five years, and their suggestion reminded me.

  So then I spent about thirty minutes trying to figure out how to install the CentOSplus kernel, and then went to bed.

  Then my post to this list provided the rest of the info.

  However, with aheros cards, you usually don’t need to do too much research at the level you are suggesting, so that is why I saw the hash as not the relevant.

  You can probably find drivers for stuff that i have no idea about using your method, but from having to build wireless embedded routers on BSD, I remembered that for AR5xxx cards it was something like what was suggested on the NoVaLug list.

  So I already know what driver I needed, after I verified what card I had installed into the system. (Since I honestly hand’t seen it in five years, due to it running in the wireless router that I built using BSD (which was running FreeBSD 7-stable, to date my references.)

  I think the last time I had to build a driver and worry about what version it was, could have been 2007. Lol…

  So thanks so much for your help with this.

  Now, if I could just find that pesky system-config-services gui…. LOL!!!!!!

  Respectfully,

  Martes G Wigglesworth

  —– Original Message —