[solved] Wireless interface not showing up -- Eeepc 1000HE

Question

Edit: for future generations, the fix is to install rfkill, then do "rfkill unblock all". wlan0 should then show up with iwconfig.
I've followed the Wireless Setup guide as best I could, but it's still not working. ifconfig only sees eth0 and lo.
The page for my laptop doesn't seem to apply -- it says that wireless works out of the box (it doesn't) and that if it doesn't, the command "ifconfig wlan0 up" should produce "SIOCSIFFLAGS: no such file or directory".
But for me, it produces "wlan0: unknown interface: No such device"
I've tried all the drivers that seemed relevant, and ath_pci seems to be the right one; at least, lsmod shows that the module wlan is being used by ath_pci, which I guess is a step in the correct direction. I honestly don't know.
Did I just stupidly miss a step somewhere, or is something actually wrong?
Thanks in advance.
Edit: output of lspci:
01:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR928X Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)
Last edited by King_Critter (2010-05-06 18:07:44)

Answer 1

...awesome. I learn something new every day.
That fixed it. To everyone who responded: thank you! You guys are awesome. ^_^
Edit: ok, another problem.
when I run this:
iwconfig wlan0 essid "MyEssid" key s:asciikey
I get:
Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (8B2A) :
SET failed on device wlan0; Invalid Argument
I get quite a few hits on google for the problem, but no solutions that would work for me. One solution is to use Network Manager, but I don't have a gui set up yet, so that's out.
Edit: Ok, I think I fixed it... I don't have a wireless network around at the moment to test it out, but at least it's now going through the motions. The solution is to use netcfg instead if iwconfig. In /etc/network.d/examples/ there are examples for different network types. Just take the relevant one, copy it up one directory (so it's in /etc/network.d/) alter the details, make sure it's named "wireless" and that the CONNECTION line in the script is also "wireless" (or rather, I think they just need to match).
Then run netcfg wireless and it'll hopefully work. You may have to be running the net-profiles daemon -- I added that to rc.conf while trying something else out and I don't know if it's actually needed.
Last edited by King_Critter (2010-05-06 23:12:33)