Nic Not Detected

ghostdawg · Member Joined: 27 Dec 2025 Posts: 130 Location: MO

I have a D-Link DWL-520 Wireless PCI Adapter that I took out of another computer because the motherboard died. It was working before the motherboard died.

I took it out of the dead computer and put it in my current tower system. The current system had been directly connected to my router and DSL modem and I had installed madwifi drivers even though there was no wireless nic at the time.

Once I put the nic inside and modprobed ath_pci driver, and type ifconfig ath0 up, I get message no device detected. Also command lspci doesn't show the nic.

I can't understand why its not being detected. The nic light blinks also, so I'm not sure if it's bad or not. I don't have another system to test it on either.

Any ideas/suggestions?

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Debian 64 - Sourcemage - Fedora 10

lberg · Sr. Member Joined: 28 Jul 2025 Posts: 1289

Do you have to manually modprobe the ath_pci driver? I thought that Atheros was a chipset with good Linux support, and would expect that the module would be automatically loaded for you.... Question

Did you check lspci & lsmod before you modprobed the driver also? Maybe that ath_pci module messes stuff up, idk.

Is there any helpful information in dmesg?

HTH...

Edit: After googling, it seems like there are different models of that card that have different chipsets. However, I think that the USA model does indeed have the Atheros chipset... You're sure that it does actually have an Atheros chipset, right? I kind of assumed that when I first wrote this post.

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platinummonkey · Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2025 6:27 pm Post subject:

ath_pci is being deprecated. try using ath5k instead. Don't know about your specific card though Razz

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Lord.DragonFly.of.Dawn · Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2025 8:47 pm Post subject:

according to some google-fu, the D-Link DWL-520 Wireless PCI Adapter REQUIRES a PCI 2.2 slot that provides it's own IRQ. If either of these conditions is not met the card will not work.

My guess is that the mother board you put it in is either PCI 2.1 compliant or shares IRQs among it's PCI slots. Try moving the card to a different unoccupied slot to (possibly) clear up the problem in the second case. In the first case you need a new Mobo to get the card working.

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ghostdawg · Member Joined: 27 Dec 2025 Posts: 130 Location: MO

After moving the card into a different slot, everything is working. This is the correct driver, ath_pci and instead of using ifconfig ath0 up I had to type dhclient ath0, bammm, and she started working. Everything setup for it to run automagically when booting.

It seems when you put some pci devices in the first slot closest to the video card, problems appear with that device. I've seen this happen with different systems also.

Thanks for all your help.

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Debian 64 - Sourcemage - Fedora 10

mmmna · . . . . Joined: 21 Apr 2025 Posts: 7224

Lord.DragonFly.of.Dawn · Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2025 3:59 pm Post subject:

I helped someone! YAY!

glad you got the problem solved.

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mmmna · . . . . Joined: 21 Apr 2025 Posts: 7224

VHockey86 · Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2025 8:20 pm Post subject:

PCI? that's so 1990s! Very Happy

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Lord.DragonFly.of.Dawn · Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2025 9:29 pm Post subject:

ghostdawg · Member Joined: 27 Dec 2025 Posts: 130 Location: MO

mmmna, you would think by now that issue would be solved but it seems to still be an issue. I guess because they want to eliminate pci slots so they're not gonna fix it.

Now mind you while using this tower system, it didn't have the wireless nic at the beginning, so after getting the G3 iMac, I put the imac on my DSL modem and moved the tower into the bedroom and added the nic since. I knew something like this would happen so I installed the madwifi drivers during the installation of my three distros.

I had to fiddle around with Debian to get it working. When I booted up Fedora 10, it picked up the nic off the bat and asked did I want to use it, no fiddling around.

Now Sourcemage is another matter, for some reason awhile back, I couldn't get the madwifi drivers installed, so I may have to hook up a nic cable and try to get it working wirelessly.

To be continued...

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Debian 64 - Sourcemage - Fedora 10

mmmna · . . . . Joined: 21 Apr 2025 Posts: 7224

ghostdawg · Member Joined: 27 Dec 2025 Posts: 130 Location: MO

The three distros installed on the tower I had to manually get debian working, even though the madwifi drivers were installed.

When I booted Fedora, everything was setup for madwifi already. It asked did I want to use it to access the internet, since no wired connection is available.

For sourcemage, I kept having issues installing madwifi and never got it installed. I'm still working on getting it to work.

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