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Glitter and Trauma

ACX111 on SUSE 10.1

The information below is believed to be accurate but is provided with absolutely no guarantee or warranty, either express or implied. If you use any of the information that follows you do so entirely at your own risk.

One of my problems with SUSE 10.1 was that it didn't recognise my Netgear boxed Texas Instruments ACX111 based wireless PCI card, a device that had been detected correctly in earlier versions of SUSE and only required the semi-automagic installation of the relevant firmware from a list in YaST Online Update to get it up and running. Well, as I hinted back then, getting it up and running isn't really difficult, but just a bit of a hassle. Here's how I did it (this is only an account of what I have done - if you follow these steps you do so entirely at your own risk).

ACX111 ProjectIt's the ACX100 Project that comes to the rescue (and it was their work in earlier SUSEs too). Now, you have to go through the fun of installing the module manually. First, I downloaded the firmware (I selected version 1.2.1.34) and renamed it according to the instructions at the bottom for that page - mine is an ACX111 chip so I renamed the file to tiacx111c16 - and then copied the file to /lib/firmware (needing root privileges to copy here of course). How did I know I had an ACX111 chip? Previous versions of SUSE in which the card was detected had told me so.

The next step was to install the driver so I first saved a copy of the installation instructions. Following the advice on that page I chose to install outside of the kernel tree. So I downloaded the latest snapshot of the driver (linked from the instructions page) extracted the archive and built the module as root. That completed without any dramas and I skipped down past the instructions for installing within the tree to the section dealing with "Testing and instering into kernel". At this point, I started getting errors. I couldn't insmod ./acx.ko but running iwconfig did show up my wireless card. I shrugged and installed the driver using the last line in the instructions.

All that remained then was to set up the card in YaST. I went to Network Devices > Network Card and chose "Traditional Method wiht ifup" as I'm mor familiar with this. Next I hit the "Add" button at the bottom of the window to manually set up the card, choosign boot time activation under the general tab and wireless for the device type. Choosing Advanced > Hardware details, I added acx_pci for the module name and noted that the configuration name was wlan0. Then I hit next and entered my netork name and WEP keys (I've never had any luck with WPA and this card and wasn'rt about to try now). I hit next and allowed YaST to do it's magic. Then I started Firefox and found I still had no internet connection. Oddly, I could access my router control panel by IP address, but not any external IPs.

The solution to this was trivial - I also have a wired network interface (designated eth0) that YaST had detected and set up automatically. Simply deleting this configuration via YaST (or changing its activation to "On cable connection" rather than starting it at boot solved the problem and the internet was back.

As I already mentioned above, this is just what worked for me and your mileage may vary. Certainly this is only relevant to ACX111 cards, at least up to the point dealing with YaST settings. There haven't yet been any kernel updates in SUSE 10.1, but when there are they may well break this (as they will the NVIDIA driver install that I did shortly afterwards) but this just requires a driver re-install. Also, the ACX111 driver is an unsupported reverse-engineering effort and although it seems pretty stable for me bad things could happen. Personally, I have an Intel-based card on order that should have native kernel support in SUSE 10.1 (and beyond) and all being well I should be switching to that shortly. Then I'll find a Windows user to buy my Netgear card.