Wifi Hell and Acer 4520 (open suse 10.3)

Chinese New Year is just tomorrow and i was walking around tesco and i saw some really cheap notebooks, RM 2k for various brands. HPs. compaqs and Acers were the models displayed. The same offer you can find in Carrefour.

I notice it comes with "Linpus Linux", a fedora based linux that is shipped by a taiwan company and Acer is putting it in these low cost notebooks.

So i grabbed one since i am playing with phyton nowadays and i plan to have a dedicated Open Suse 10.3 instead of running it via my Vista vmware (ouch!). There is where the hell begins...

The Wifi wouldn't work and this is not some newbie problem. Although some manage to get it working perfectly on Mandriva and Ubuntu, it seems that the Wifi that comes with this ACER Aspire 4520 has a string of problem when it comes to getting it to work on 32 bit Open Suse.

The said wifi is Atheros Wifi.

The following are things that DON'T work :-


- using ndiswrapper and getting the Atheros wireless driver for XP
- acerpanam.com latest drivers and via ndiswrapper
- madwifi default packages and latest build (up to this blog entry, so feel free to try)
- any vista/xp driver attempting to be used via the ndiswrapper (ndisgtk + related stuff)


There was one Ubuntu forum that shows how this was done successfully on the Ubuntu, and somewhere else a guy in malaysia copied the instruction and posted it as his own...with no credits given. However, the exact steps doesnt work on Open Suse 10.3 even after i mapped the correct differences.


Finally 12 hours of non sleep attempt, here is your ANSWER :

1. Download the following files and transfer to ur linux via USB drive.

http://madwifi.org/attachment/ticket/1679/madwifi-ng-0933.ar2425.20071130.i386.patch?format=raw

http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-ng/madwifi-ng-r2756-20071018.tar.gzr2756-20071018.tar.gz

Read the How to Apply from here : http://madwifi.org/ticket/1679


2. Read the following and do :-
http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/FirstTimeHowTo

3. Run the "yast2 lan" or via ur yast2 (my computer, administrator setting) and set ur configuration from there, setting via the iwconfig etc won't work. After that use the icon on ur system tray and connect to ur SSID (router), re enter the WEP key if needed.


There. I just saved you 12 hours.

As for Nvidia drivers, just download http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_169.09.html
and do the sh NVIDIA* instead of depending on the yast.