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Atheros AR5007 working but not perfect. Heres the guide.

oldmaclover

By oldmaclover,
in LAN and Wireless

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oldmaclover
oldmaclover
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OK here is my attempt at a guide:

 

First, make sure the card is on in another OS and restart. Those of you hoping to not have to dual boot are out of luck right now.

 

1. Starting from 10.5.5 and a vanilla kernel.

 

2. Download and install the Airport Update 2008-004. Reboot.

 

3. Download and install the IO8211Family.kext at the beginning of this thread with Kexthelper unless you feel like doing all of the permission repairs and stuff.

 

4. Download and install Kismac trunk r319.

 

5. Reboot. You have a 40% chance of getting a boot without a kernel panic. Just retry, it will eventually reboot fine.

 

6. Open Kismac before you do anything. Go to prefererences and find the tab for drivers. Add the Airport Extreme Passive mode one. Active mode does not work. Exit that menu and then click start scan. You will start to see networks. Once you see networks quit Kismac.

 

7. Now go the airport icon in the top bar and click on Join Other Network. (if the icon is not there you need to go to network preferences and enable the icon.) Then click on show networks. Your network will come up. Click on it, click join and then it will ask you for your network password. Enter that and then it will connect to your network and be stable. You will have to set up a network in the networking preference panel for the airport card just like normal.

 

On my Presario C771 the WIFI lights are not on blue but the card still works.

 

When you restart you will sometimes get a kernel error. Just try again. When you restart you will only have to do steps 6 and 7 and will not have to reenter you network password if you put it in your keychain when prompted.

 

It works everytime I boot now as long as the hardware button on the notebook is not pressed. The network stays on all the time and is fast.

 

If you also get it to work please let us know.

 

Pictures attached.

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oldmaclover
oldmaclover
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If you setup your network in the preference panels before you start Kismac the preference panel will not crash. Then after that you need to follow steps 6-7 and do those things only or yes, you might open something that causes a system crash. If I open Kismac, find networks and then immediately exit Kismac then there are no crashes. When Kismac is still open I get all sorts of issues.

 

The boot issue is annoying though, but personally is better than having a 2" USB dongle hanging off the side of the computer just waiting to get bumped and broken off.

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mackerintel
mackerintel
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I don't know why it doesn't work on some machines but not on others. It may be somehow related to the subvendor/subdevice or the way how kismet and normal wifi init works. Additionally it may be that some changes need to de done to ath_pci part of AirportAtheros (I modified only ath_hal part bu normally ath_pci should be the same). The best shot to find the difference is to use qemu with pciproxy to compare what OSX does and what linux or windows drivers do. But depending on amount of data collected by pciproxy it may take a lot of time (something I don't have right now) to process. Additionally I now have AR5008EG which is well recognised by vanilla IO80211family as airport extreme and I don't want to put my old card back since it's not made to be changed frequently and I don't want the connectors to be mechanically broken. But if someone points out where the problem is I'll fix it (but can't test it). Same goes for crash at boot. Additionally I'm offering my assistance to anyone willing to do the work of problem tracing (but remember it will probably be a difficult work) If you're interested PM me

Hey guys just wanted to know will this work on AA1.

AFAIR on AA1 AR5007EG is on pcie-hotplug which is not supported by OSX. But in 0sx86 you never know unless you try

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Ztardust
Ztardust
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This is just crazy....

 

I´ve been stuck with the AR5007eg not working for so long... so I finally bought Dell 1395 and inserted in my laptop...

 

Two days later you guys come up with the solution for the AR5007! :)

 

Anyhow, congratulations! :)

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2manydjs
2manydjs
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AFAIR on AA1 AR5007EG is on pcie-hotplug which is not supported by OSX. But in 0sx86 you never know unless you try

Hi, thanks for you work and replies! I lack the technical knowledge to understand what you mean with pcie-hotplug and how it influences the use of the driver (google and wikipedia didn't point me in the right direction either..). If this card uses pcie-hotplug, what do other cards use?

 

Thanks!

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mackerintel
mackerintel
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Hi, thanks for you work and replies! I lack the technical knowledge to understand what you mean with pcie-hotplug and how it influences the use of the driver (google and wikipedia didn't point me in the right direction either..). If this card uses pcie-hotplug, what do other cards use?

 

Thanks!

The card is connected by pcie-connector. The difference is how this connector is managed by motherboard: either it's declared as permanently connected or be a disconnectable device (pcie-hotplug). In the latter case the connector needs special initialisation which AFAIR not handled by OSX. Hotplug or not hotplug is determined by your motherboard and not by wlan card.

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arivee
arivee
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Im in the same situation as diogan and osik but with a slightly different flavor...

 

I am running on an iDeneb 10.5.5 distro on an eMachines D620 (hyper tempted by a pre-BF sale from BB) its an Athlon 64 machine with an Atheros AR5007EG card and an ATI x1200 video card, upped to 2gb of memory.

 

Had I known how stacked the deck was against the pieces of hardware I had, I wouldnt have gone and wiped Vista totally from the machine. :) Then again, I dont read so good.

 

My install config had me checking all the options save for the LAN and video options. Everything went well - but I did have to add the "Graphics Mode"="640x480x32" command line for first boot to avoid the registration process.

 

I followed the instructions above with a slight twist. When I attempted to install the Airport Update - it would not allow me, saying my drive was invalid (or something similar). My solution was to skip ahead to the second step and insert the IOFamily kext. After that, I redid the update and it went on without a hitch.

 

I proceeded on the next step (which was to reinstall the kext) -- and followed the rest through. After that, viola! My card was detected, and a look at the 'about this computer' button reveals that it is indeed being recognized (including the MAC addy!).

 

However, no matter which utility I use, no networks gets detected.

 

I have UBUNTU installed in another partition, but somehow I lost the ability to have the grub dual boot - I did verify prior to that, that the wireless card was working under Ubuntu. Doesnt that mean when you restart a computer - the option turns off?

 

Anyway, this is a plea yet again for someone to shed some insight on the issue of the non performing, although present and detected card.

 

Finally, not sure if this is the right place for this - will this OS be able to handle 4 gigs of ram?

 

UPDATE: I tried to set up an adhoc network on airport, but none of my computers/psp/ps3/wii can detect it. Under Ubuntu, I am able to get on my network fine, activating the wireless switch does nothing, no lights, but the wireless card is definitely active.

 

UPDATE2: I was finally able to verify the radio is indeed active and broadcasting - I setup an adhoc connection and my pocketpc device was able to detect the signal and connect to it. I have no idea how to actually access either the laptop or the pocketpc - but at least it told me the card was broadcasting. I hope these observations are helping anyone figure this thing out.

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myi4u
myi4u
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i got this kext running on my Acer Aspire One, thanks. but i'm having the same problem as althon's which is needing to reinstall the kext after every reboot. any solution to this yet?

 

hi mercindustries,

 

so, are you saying that after you reinstall the kext (without rebooting) and you are able to see your wireless network?

 

i have followed the process but only managed to get my wifi card detected but was unable to detect any wireless network. i mess around with the iopcifamily.kext mentioned in some topics but still to no avail. some posters said that airport does not work on en0. anyone of you able to verify this?

 

when i use Kismac to scan the network, the progress bar shows up only a few seconds and it disappears and the button at the bottom became "Start Scan" again and my network card is on en0. i changed it the en1 and i can see it scanning for wireless network on a round thingy beside the Start Scan/Stop Scan button and the button stayed on "Stop Scan".

 

i have restored the system from previous backup and i will start fresh tonight. hopefully, it will scan the network. fingers crossed.

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alain30100
alain30100
Posted
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:wacko: Congratulations ! Good Job ! ;)

Wifi is running after installation with your procedure on an Acer Aspire 7720Z.

Wifi card is an Atheros AR5007EG.

And Mac Os is 10.5.2, I have not installed AirPortExtremeUp2008004.

 

But after each reboot, it is necessary to

 

1- re-install the kext

2- repair permissions

3- reboot

4- follow your procedure since step 6.

 

Is there a way to avoid this ?

 

Thanks again,

 

Alain.

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myi4u
myi4u
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hi,

 

i suppose Acer Aspire One is using the same Atheros 5007EG with Samsung NC10 ?? So, since this method works for AA1, i don't see any reason y it would not work on NC10. i must give it a go tonight.

 

btw, alain30100 and merindustries, is your wifi card set as en0 or en1?

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w3c.org
w3c.org
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Ok well I don't really know what I did. I updated the Airport Extreme via Pacifist, because otherwise it was saying like "you can't install this software on your computer" and everything. Anyway after that I installed the .kext, repaired the extensions, and rebooted. For the first time in months the airport icon was clear, but i couldn't find any network nor create any network which could be seen.

KisMAC wasn't event searching for something when I loaded the "Airport Extreme (passive mode)" driver, and I was stuck just like in the beginning. Anyway, I played with it for a few hours, loading & unloading the extension, and suddenly *BAM* I was able to create an ad-hoc network and to connect to it with another computer. But then, nothing: the other computer didn't have any IP address attributed, so I was stuck again.

But finally I plugged an ethernet cable in the hackintosh (an Acer 2920z by the way, with OSX iATKOS v4i (10.5.4) upgraded to 10.5.5), told it to "share the ethernet connection (en0) via airport express (en1), and gave him the IP addresses by hand (10.0.2.1 for the hackintosh, subnet mask 255.255.0.0, router 10.0.2.1) then I connected the other laptop to it and gave it an IP address by hand too (10.0.2.10, same subnet mask, router 10.0.2.1).

And know what, it works! But I don't know until when... Maybe it'll be down at the first reboot. We'll see.

Thanks a lot anyway for the .kext, hope it'll help!

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