I have to disable and then re-enable wireless drivers after every reboot?

**diablo75** · May 14th, 2008

On my computer, I have a wireless card with an Atheros chipset (it's a D-Link DWL-G510). When I start my computer up, I have to go into System>Administration>Hardware Drivers to get my card working. When I first open Hardware Drivers up, it lists:

Atheros Hardware Access Layer (HAL) (Checked Enabled, but "Not in Use")
Support for Atheros 802.11 wireless LAN card (Checked Enabled, but "Not in Use")

To get my card to work, I have to uncheck (disable) the second item listed, and then check it back off to re-enable it. When I do this, the status of both items changes from "Not in use" to "In Use" and within a few seconds, the card works again and connects to my wireless router.

I have to do this every time I restart or turn the computer on after shut down. I'd like to fix this so I don't have to do this every time I want my drivers to be used by the card. Any ideas on how to fix this?

**nixscripter** · May 14th, 2008

It sounds like the proprietary driver (which is probably a kernel module) is not being loaded at boot. If you can figure out which one it is, you can make it load at boot with a simple edit.

I don't know what it's called, and if you don't here's how you can figure it out. Before and after you enable the card, get a listing of drivers currently loaded in the kernel and see what was added. The command is:

Code:

lsmod

You will probably find drivers like ieee80211 were also added, but they should all have dependencies on the Atheros driver.

Once you figure it out, you can add its name to the list of modules in /etc/modules. Hopefully, that will do it.