Wireless interface not showing up

[drbrowen]

Hi,
While I'm not new to linux I haven't worked with wireless and linux for about 8 years. I inherited a wrt54G V1.1 when I moved into a new house. I've been using Gargoyle 1.0.0_beta5 for a month or so with wired-only. I recently tried to start the wireless interface, and it appears to not exist. The wl.o module is not loaded. I tried to load it. No go. I updated to gargoyle 1.0.2, and still no go. When I try to insmod the wl module, I get the following:

root@OpenWrt:~# insmod wl
Warning: loading wl will taint the kernel: non-GPL license - Proprietary
See http://www.tux.org/lkml/#export-tainted for information about tainted modules
insmod: init_module: wl: No such device

Is my box fried, or is the V 1.* version of the chip no longer supported, or am I doing something stupid? I hope the last option, so I can fix it.

[Eric]

That device and that version are definitely supported. Sounds to me like there's either a hardware problem with your particular device, OR... there might be a problem with the old NVRAM variables which OpenWrt doesn't use, but are used by the hardware to configure the wireless device properly.

I found what looks like it might be a similar problem here. Try running:

Code: Select all

nvram set sromrev=3
nvram commit

But no guarantees... I've never heard/seen this error before.

[drbrowen]

I found this:

https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/5020

It appears that support for my chip no longer exists in the binary wl driver.

My next step is to see which OpenWrt package still supports my chip and see if Gargoyle will run on it.

[Eric]

Oh.. huh. that's good to know. I didn't realize the v1.x of the WRT54G used the same chip as the Asus router mentioned (which i had heard didn't work anymore). That's good to know.

If you downgrade to Beta3, that's based on kamikaze 7.09, so wireless will probably work for you if you try that. However... there are a LOT of bugs that have been fixed since then, so it's up to you.