ThinkPad 11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Mini Express Adapter
ThinkPad 11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Mini Express AdapterThis is a WiFi Adapter that is installed in a Mini-PCI Express slot Features
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Different chipsets?
It has been reported that different chipsets may be used by Lenovo for this controller. This may, however, be only an issue of outdated PCI IDs. To clarify, please update your PCI IDs and report the name of the chipset. On a T60 running OpenSuse 10.2, the following code does the job:
# update-pciids # lspci|grep Atheros 03:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5418 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)
If you get a different name for the chipset despite having the most current PCI IDs, please report it here! Note that, since pciids only translates numeric IDs to human-readable IDs, it is very unlikely (if not impossible) that the chip with PCI ID 0168:0024 gets annotated as different chipsets.
IBM Partnumbers
42T0825 [1]
Linux WiFi driver
There's now (04.04.07) added experimental support for the AR5008 chipset to a new branch in MadWifi. I have compiled this driver successfully, but it's still at an experimental stage, so no promises are given. Howto
There is an old ticket for this card at madwifi, #1001.
There is an new ticket for this card at madwifi-branch, #1243.
To install this driver, just checkout the branch madwifi-hal-0.9.30.13.
mkdir /tmp/madwifi cd /tmp/madwifi svn checkout http://svn.madwifi.org/branches/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.13/ cd madwifi-hal-0.9.30.13/ make make install *choose [r] reboot
News fron the madwifi-branch:
* milestone changed from version 0.9.x - progressive release candidate phase to version 0.9.4. FYI: the madwifi-hal-0.9.30.13 branch has been merged to trunk (and the branch has been removed). If you don't want to wait until the next release (v0.9.4), you could go with a snapshot or checkout from trunk - just make sure that your code is >= r2360.
Until the madwifi driver stabilizes you might want to get the Windows driver from Lenovo's support site and use a recent version of ndiswrapper (>= 1.29). I've compiled a Howto for this card.
Problems/Bugs?
A number of folks have reported getting errors while using recent versions of madwifi with Feisty on the T60p with the AR5418. When the NMI is received, the wifi dies. If anyone knows the solution, please elaborate.
Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason b0 on CPU 0. You have some hardware problem, likely on the PCI bus. Dazed and confused, but trying to continue
wifi0: rx FIFO overrun; resetting wifi0: rx FIFO overrun; resetting wifi0: rx FIFO overrun; resetting
See the following threads and bug reports: [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Hardware switch
Some ThinkPads have a hardware switch that must be in the on position for the radio to work, regardless of driver state:
In addition to hard-switching the wireless card, the switch also generates an acpi event on transition from hi->lo and vice versa. It is however the same event in both directions.
