Acer 5050-4697 Atheros WiFi and ndiswrapper

[Thetargos]

So the saga continues. This freaking laptop is making me pull my hair out. If only the darned machine would take a PCMCIA card, but it so happens that even refuses to do so. The latest grief is with ndiswrapper. Fedora 8 provided some hope in the form of actually loading the ath5k driver with the 2.6.23.1-42.fc8 kernel, but with -49.fc8 (which the driver changed names, by the way, to ath_pci), the driver never picks up the card, and the one that does (with the -42.fc8 kernel), doesn't initialize the card.

So I went down the ndiswrapper path, and basically is the same thing, the driver is not able to initialize the WLAN device. It is so frustrating!

At any rate, I get this on dmesg:


ndiswrapper version 1.48 loaded (smp=yes, preempt=no)
ndiswrapper: driver net5211 (,01/20/2006,4.2.2.7) loaded
PCI: Enabling device 0000:02:00.0 (0000 -> 0002)
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:02:00.0 to 64
ndiswrapper (NdisWriteErrorLogEntry:191): log: C0001389, count: 4, return_address: f8e3d5d4
ndiswrapper (NdisWriteErrorLogEntry:194): code: 0xe8787e00
ndiswrapper (NdisWriteErrorLogEntry:194): code: 0x28
ndiswrapper (NdisWriteErrorLogEntry:194): code: 0xf8a6a000
ndiswrapper (NdisWriteErrorLogEntry:194): code: 0xf8a6a000
ndiswrapper (mp_init:216): couldn't initialize device: C000009A
ndiswrapper (pnp_start_device:439): Windows driver couldn't initialize the device (C0000001)
ndiswrapper (mp_halt:259): device e71cb500 is not initialized - not halting
ndiswrapper: device eth%d removed
ndiswrapper: probe of 0000:02:00.0 failed with error -22
usbcore: registered new interface driver ndiswrapper

Any thoughts?

To add insult to injury, reading around I found out that some WLAN cards on laptops needs to be "preactivated" though ACPI, and to boot this machine I need to disable ACPI :rolleyes:

I'm quickly reaching one sad realization: Avoid Acer laptop computers like the plague, if you want Linux.

[gdawg102]

I have an Acer 3680-2682, and am having problems installing the wireless as well. This is the first time for me in using Linux since I have always been a Windows user, and it's frustrating. I hear you on acer, that's what I have been feeling every time I run into a problem...fedora was able to detect that I had a wireless device when I installed it two days ago, but now it's not even under "hardware" when I check it under System->admin->network...I'm going to resign and just use wired connection at this point.....

[Thetargos]

That's what I've been doing with this system. What frustratesme the most is that not even the cardbus is working, so I can't think of just buying a PCMCIA add-on card and use that instead. I guess the name they were famous for here in Mex is also true for Linux: basuracer roughly translated like "trahsacer". Originally meant to mean that one day past your warranty the system will fail and since you're off the warranty, you'll need to buy a new system, for Linux, though, the term seems to apply from the get-go :D