wireless not showing when 'iwconfig' on latest 1.0.4 on rpi ?

[tacgnol]

Hello, i tried 2 different card on the raspberry pi. with a previous version back 2-3 months it was working fine, but now both card doesn't show up when i iwconfig.

they seems to be recognize by the rpi, i can see on the console all the info when i plug the usb interface, but nothing under iwconfig. i tried with the Alfa AWUS036NH and TP-link TL-WN725N. Do I need to enable something with this new version ? on a laptop with the i386 version, everything is plug & play.

Thanks in advance!

[three_legs]

did you try putting the card down and back up ? is it showing up in ifconfig ?

[three_legs]

Also you have to use a usb hub or power inejctor with a RBPI because it can't source that much

[tacgnol]

did you try putting the card down and back up ? is it showing up in ifconfig ?

no I didn't tried that, will try this tonight

[tacgnol]

Also you have to use a usb hub or power inejctor with a RBPI because it can't source that much

yeah i did this, with an externel power source for the usb hub. same result.

[cminus]

FWIW, I have also noticed same thing with Samsung ARM Chromebook 1.0.4 Build (ifconfig -a does not show mlan0). Not sure what to do to get this up and running.

[lawrencethepentester]

connect your alpha card for example
and type in terminal
lsusb
to show that it was recognized successfully

if you have wifi card ... just try to make it up by wcid manager

[ufwdisable]

I can confirm the same issue. I have the latest release (1.0.4) on both Rpi and arm Cbook. Tested with several power injected usb cards and internal card on Cbook (usually identified as mlan0). I've reverted back to using 1.0.0 as this issue seems beyond my scope to rectify. From my research, seems to be a module locking issue.
Wish this wasn't the case but it seems after reading this forum I'm not alone with this. If I come across a fix, I'll post back here.

[valance]

I never ran the image before 1.0.4. But I can share my experience with my current wireless dongle and the issues I had were definitely related to the modules

The dongle I was using was based on the ralink drivers rt2800usb specifically rt2870

The first thing I had to do was install the ralink firmware


apt-get install firmware-ralink

Second I tried to enable the rt2800usb module.


modprobe rt2800usb

This FAILED with an error saying that it could not find the module within the 3.6.11-cutdown modules directory

cding into /lib/ to discover there is no module directory at all!


I then decided to update the firmware for the RPi using rpi-update knowing that it would install the newest modules


sudo wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update -O /usr/bin/rpi-update && sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/rpi-update

NOTE 1: FOR THE rpi-update COMMAND TO SUCCEED BE SURE TO SET YOUR DATE CORRECTLY


date --s "7 august 2013 09:10:00"

NOTE 2: THE rpi-update COMMAND UPDATES THE MODULES BUT IN MY CASE THE MODULES DIRECTORY DID NOT EXIST


I apologize as this may be a dumb thing to do but it worked in my case. I populated the /lib/modules/ directory with one copied from https://github.com/xbianonpi/qemu-env/
Downloaded the .zip and extracted /lib/modules/3.6.11-cutdown into /lib/modules

After Note 1 and Note 2, I was able to sucessfully run rpi-update.

However, after a reboot the kernel remained on 3.6.11-cutdown

Determine current kernel version with:

uname -a


I updated the kernel using the following information from http://nethack.ch/2013/01/16/update-the-kernel-and-modules-of-a-raspberry-pi/


Download current kernel package
Download the current firmware from Github:
https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/archive/master.zip

Unpack the file in a temporary folder.

Copy data to SD card
Insert the SD card into your card reader. You should get two new volumes (one on Windows):

Boot partition (FAT, Read and Writable, contains “kernel.img” and “bootcode.bin” f.ex. )
Data partition (ext2, Read-Only on Mac, Read-Write on Linux, Not visible in Windows)
Remove all data from the boot partition, except the config.txt if you have one.

The unpacked Zip-archive contains a folder named “boot”. Copy the content of this folder to the root of the boot partition.

After reboot
uname -a returned 3.8.11+ and
modprobe rt2800usb sucessfully loaded my rt2800usb module

A lot of information, and I apologize that it is so rambling. A lot of searching and trial and error before I figured this out so I wanted to get it down in case anyone else was struggling with a similar issue.