Fedora 10 on IBM Thinkpad T41 - Wireless Issue

Spend an hour installing Sabayon 4 Linux on an old IBM Thinkpad T41 but could not get the wireless to work.

#lspci |grep Ethernet

02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82540EP Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Mobile) (rev 03)
02:02.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5212/AR5213 Multiprotocol MAC/baseband processor (rev 01)

Hence downloaded Fedora 10 to try out. Installation was much faster but wireless is still a hit and miss. Worst, there seems to be a background process that keep interrupting the mouse movement.

Soon discovered that the default ath5k module was causing the problem. It keeps generating the noise floor calibration timeout and unable to reset channel error message.

#dmesg

Jan  5 23:54:43 localhost kernel: ath5k phy0: noise floor calibration timeout (2432MHz)
Jan  5 23:54:43 localhost kernel: ath5k phy0: ath5k_chan_set: unable to reset channel (2432 Mhz)
Jan  5 23:54:44 localhost kernel: ath5k phy0: noise floor calibration timeout (2427MHz)
Jan  5 23:54:44 localhost kernel: ath5k phy0: ath5k_chan_set: unable to reset channel (2427 Mhz)

Upon discovery, I blacklist and remove the module:
#echo ath5k > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
#rmmod ath5k

Then I go to http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration and run its graphical setup via firefox to add the repo to my software sources. I need it to download the old madwifi ath_pci module.

Check my Linux version with

#uname -r

and it gives 2.6.27.9-159.fc10.i686.

From this info, I select in Add/Remove Software the correct madwifi i686 package to install. Learnt that those with PAE are meant for computer that support more than 4G of memory. PAE=Physical Address Extension.

After installed, I run

#modprobe ath_pci

to insert the module. Restart the computer and it is done.

To be continue ..

18 Jan 2009: I stopped using Fedora 10 ... found that it is a bit slow on T41 ... now trying out Linux Mint 5.