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Wireless - AR9280


Radiance
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When I was looking for drivers for the AR9280 I didn't find any cause they don't exist, but I did find this this (translation).

 

If I understand correctly, in the 2nd post is said that drivers for the AR9280 are available in 10.6 (Snow Leopard). This is not very unlikely since the AR9280 has support for Mac OS.

These solutions support Windows XP®, Windows Vista®, Mac OS® and Linux® operating systems.

 

Can anyone confirm this?

 

If these drivers exist in 10.6, is it possible to get them working in 10.5.x?

 

Radiance

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Well, I tried it myself without succes.

 

I got myself Snow Leopard 10A380 and extracted the IO80211Family.kext, from this kext I took the AirPortAtheros.kext.

 

Then I got AirPortAtheros.kext and put into the IO80211Family.kext on my 1000HE, repaired permissions and rebooted. No wireless.

 

Then I decided to replace to whole IO80211Family.kext, repaired permissions and rebooted. No wireless.

 

Also checked the Info.plist inside the AirPortAtheros.kext:

<string>pci106b,0086</string>

<string>pci106b,1c</string>

<string>pci168c,1014</string>

<string>pci168c,13</string>

<string>pci168c,14</string>

<string>pci168c,15</string>

<string>pci168c,16</string>

<string>pci168c,17</string>

<string>pci168c,18</string>

<string>pci168c,19</string>

<string>pci168c,1a</string>

<string>pci168c,1b</string>

<string>pci168c,1c</string>

<string>pci168c,23</string>

<string>pci168c,24</string>

<string>pci168c,2a</string>

<string>pci168c,52</string>

<string>pci168c,55</string>

<string>pci168c,57</string>

<string>pci168c,58</string>

<string>pci168c,58a</string>

<string>pci168c,86</string>

<string>pci168c,87</string>

<string>pci168c,ff1c</string>

<string>pci168c,ff1d</string>

 

I believe pci168c,2a belongs to the AR9280, so it should be supported?

 

If anyone is interested in the IO80211Family.kext, I could upload it somewhere.

 

Has anyone got any idea what I could still try?

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  • 4 weeks later...
Well, I tried it myself without succes.

 

I got myself Snow Leopard 10A380 and extracted the IO80211Family.kext, from this kext I took the AirPortAtheros.kext.

 

Then I got AirPortAtheros.kext and put into the IO80211Family.kext on my 1000HE, repaired permissions and rebooted. No wireless.

 

Then I decided to replace to whole IO80211Family.kext, repaired permissions and rebooted. No wireless.

 

Also checked the Info.plist inside the AirPortAtheros.kext:

 

 

I believe pci168c,2a belongs to the AR9280, so it should be supported?

 

If anyone is interested in the IO80211Family.kext, I could upload it somewhere.

 

Has anyone got any idea what I could still try?

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Conceivably you may also need the IONetworkingFamily.kext, as well. There were, if memory serves correctly, quite a few interconnected kexts involved in the whole networking schtick.

 

However, getting that to work could prove -very- interesting, as I'm off to pick up an Asus 1008HA tomorrow, that sports an Atheros AR9285 wireless card...

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Conceivably you may also need the IONetworkingFamily.kext, as well. There were, if memory serves correctly, quite a few interconnected kexts involved in the whole networking schtick.

 

However, getting that to work could prove -very- interesting, as I'm off to pick up an Asus 1008HA tomorrow, that sports an Atheros AR9285 wireless card...

Looks like you will have to install the entirety of the Snow Leopard alpha, or wait until the final release. I tried loading the Atheros kext with /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Library/ set as a secondary repository for kexts, and it resolved the dependencies but none of the modules loaded due to missing kernel stuff. If you want to do this for yourself to see the errors in case you can figure something out (I doubt it) or are just curious, then do the following in a terminal.

 

sudo -s
cd /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD/System/Library/Extensions
kextload -r . IO80211Family.kext

 

I wish this method would work, but it looks like nothing will short of a full install of Snow Leopard. I might try doing that, but it is iffy since alpha software tends to be alpha for a reason. lol Cheers.

post-458936-1248114860_thumb.png

post-458936-1248114943_thumb.png

post-458936-1248115003_thumb.png

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I have an atheros 9280 but dont have access to the IO80211 kext snow leopard. Can you upload it ? I can test this

Test what exactly? Unless you know some sort of fancy trick, the kexts are not going to load into a Leopard kernel. Cheers.

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I maintain, you're loading the dependencies of IO80211etc.kext but your operating system, which is basically a FreeBSD kernel with a kick ass gui, requires a -seperate- equal and not recursive module to work.

 

The "dependencies" aren't infinite. But I maintain, you're going to need the IONetworkingFamily.kext and probably the equivalent com.apple.etcetc to go with it. It might be a bit of a hassle, but if you can manage to clear up the dependancy problems, it should still be doable.

 

I just got my hands on my new little eee pc 1008ha this evening and still haven't manage to do anything more interesting than upgrade the ram to 2gb, so far. I did, however, make a point of getting my hands on an alpha copy of snow leopard. I'm going to work on getting it all up and running over the next few days. Experimentation may not be the thing I play around with however. I've also got a triple boot scenario I want to get working first. Once I get that sorted and the incidentals all up and working on the OSX installation, that's going to be the first thing I play around with, though.

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I would just like to confirm that my AR9280 does indeed work in Snow Leopard, although seemingly only in 32bit mode (with Snow Leopard 10a380 anyway). I attached a screenshot showing it working, and I will post my experiences with Snow Leopard in general as time moves on. Cheers.

post-458936-1248467592_thumb.png

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Hey, spiffy :)

 

I was just going to chime in (I've been landlocked for a few days, out in the middle of internetless-land). You were, in fact, right. I stand by the fact that the screens weren't proof enough, but still. I went through hours of jury-rigging with kexts from Snow Leopard and still couldn't manage to get the damn thing to resolve all it's dependencies, to the point where I would, eventually, have been required to install the Snow Leopard kernel itself. Apparently, working one's way down the dependency line, it's wriggles it's way all the way back. And, of course, good luck booting Leopard on SL's kernel.

 

It's good to know that it -does- in fact work with Snow Leopard though. Any news on that experience would be great (howtofors and wherewithals of the entire installation experience, as it were).

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Hey, spiffy :(

 

I was just going to chime in (I've been landlocked for a few days, out in the middle of internetless-land). You were, in fact, right. I stand by the fact that the screens weren't proof enough, but still. I went through hours of jury-rigging with kexts from Snow Leopard and still couldn't manage to get the damn thing to resolve all it's dependencies, to the point where I would, eventually, have been required to install the Snow Leopard kernel itself. Apparently, working one's way down the dependency line, it's wriggles it's way all the way back. And, of course, good luck booting Leopard on SL's kernel.

 

It's good to know that it -does- in fact work with Snow Leopard though. Any news on that experience would be great (howtofors and wherewithals of the entire installation experience, as it were).

So far the wireless has been solid with no issues. However, there is still not a 64bit version of the driver (the entire AirPortAtheros.kext) so I have to run it with the -x32 flag in order to use it. That is not a big deal and I imagine a 64bit version will be out soon if not by final release obviously, but oh well.

 

As for installing it, I just extracted knowledge the guide here.

 

http://www.infinitemac.com/f57/how-to-inst...-on-a-pc-t3137/

 

I also posted some useful kernel extensions in a thread within the same section, so you may want to look into that for stuff like a 64bit/32bit (as in hybrid-compiled) version of VoodooHDA and VoodooPS2. CoreVidia works for video in 32bit mode, but I ended up ditching it in favour of adding my graphics card information into my DSDT file since that produces cleaner results imo and is obviously compatible with both 64bit and 32bit. Cheers. =]

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That makes for an interesting little prospect -right- there. I went through a little quick and dirty installation, but had some serious issues booting up my little eeepc. Time was a bit on the tight side. :(

 

On the other hand, if you're getting that kind of stability out of the wireless connector under snow leopard, then it might just be worth going through the whole shebang again. Although in all fairness, taking into account the amount of trouble reinstalling leopard and then snow leopard on an eeepc entails, I'm almost tempted to hold out 'till September...

 

Still. Tempting.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'm going to give the latest snow leopard build a go on my eeePC 1008 this weekend which uses this card to see if I can't get it to work. Will report back with how it works out. Would be quite nice not to have to swap it out, and if snow leopard adds Ethernet support too, double bonus.

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Oh, DO get backto us about that. RL isn't giving me enough time to see straight, much less experiment with Snow Leo for the next several months.

 

I'd love to know if you actually manage to get it to work though...!

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So, the AR9285 in the eeePC 1008HA is pci168c,2b sadly (not in the list). I've tried manually adding this to the AirPortAtheros.kext as I figure it's very similar to the other models, but not even getting any detection still. Anyone have any ideas about how to approach this? I think we're very close to support for this WLAN card. Other than wireless, my Snow Leo install is running so nicely.

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So, the AR9285 in the eeePC 1008HA is pci168c,2b sadly (not in the list). I've tried manually adding this to the AirPortAtheros.kext as I figure it's very similar to the other models, but not even getting any detection still. Anyone have any ideas about how to approach this? I think we're very close to support for this WLAN card. Other than wireless, my Snow Leo install is running so nicely.

 

Yes, I believe this is likely the issues we had with non-supported video cards in same series before(especially ATI), so some modifications should make it work as the wi-fi card is in the ar928x family which looks mostly supported in snow kitty.

 

By the way, could you get the video running with the snow kexts only, cause I had issues getting it run via EFI strings even with the Device IDs added in them..

 

Lets hope for this..

 

Wejgomi.

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I have the video registering as GMA950 with an efi string, but cannot get resolution higher than 800x600. I'm also struggling with sound at the moment. Trying to avoid loading up on outside kexts currently, so not using usual leopard methods. Will see what I can do when I get a chance to play tonight.

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This seems to be the offical thread on the AR928* wireless drivers...

or at least as far as i can tell, I've spent hours looking across the internet to see if anyone else has made any progress on this, and this thread seems to have the most progress. I'm quite surprised by the amount of people that are trying with no avail to get this to work (or are begging/complaining because no one else has gotten it to work for them)... hopefully we can get support for these wireless cards, I'll be checking back here periodically as well as searching other places (though i highly doubt there will be a solution anywhere else before here).

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I got Snow Leopard running perfectly (vanilla, kexts loaded via chameleon) on my 1000HE with AR9280.

The card was detected right away :(

 

Radiance, can you provide some details on how you installed Snow on the 1000HE? What guide did you follow? Im getting KPs no matter what I try. I have tried directly installing Chameleon RC3 and I have also tried the netbookinstaller method.

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