Wirelss card not being detected in backtrack 5

Posted by Jesse Nelson on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Jesse Nelson
Published on 2013-03-30T19:23:48Z Indexed on 2014/06/11 21:28 UTC
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I just installed backtrack 5 and I am unable to detect my wireless card. iwconfig doesn't list my interface. I can see that the hardware is present in lspci -vnn (see below) but I can't get the interface detected. I have tried to reinstall the compat-wireless package but I get errors during the build (see below) I have done a ton of researching and I keep hitting a brick wall, mostly because the wiki for backtrack is down and I can't find any good resources. Does anyone know how to fix the issue? Also, does anyone no how I can scan the hardware to determine what NIC is assigning my interface? If I can figure out the interface name I think I can set it up manually by putting up the link and using wireless-tools to manually configure the connection, this is what I had to do in arch on my mac.

As stated the wiki for backtrack is down and I can't find any help on the issue. I tried to do the full kernel upgrade suggested in my software update but after the update was complete and I logged back in I had a new log in manager and the only thing I was able to log into was window managers. However, after this update my wireless was working fine. Please help I am new to Linux and the wiki is down, I have nowhere else to turn.

Forgot to mention I am using the KDE version, not Gnome.

Thanks in advance for any help or support.

Attempt at make:

root@bt:/usr/src/compat-wireless-3.3-rc1-2# make
/usr/src/compat-wireless-3.3-rc1-2/config.mk:254: "WARNING: CONFIG_CFG80211_WEXT will be deactivated or not working because kernel was compiled with CONFIG_WIRELESS_EXT=n. Tools using wext interface like iwconfig will not work. To activate it build your kernel e.g. with CONFIG_LIBIPW=m."
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.38/build M=/usr/src/compat-wireless-3.3-rc1-2 modules
make: *** /lib/modules/2.6.38/build: No such file or directory.  Stop.
make: *** [modules] Error 2

lspci output:

root@bt:/usr/src/compat-wireless-3.3-rc1-2# lspci -vnn -i net

lspci: I/O error at net, line 0

root@bt:/usr/src/compat-wireless-3.3-rc1-2# lspci -vnn

02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Atheros Communications Inc. Device [168c:0032] (rev ff) (prog-if ff)
        !!! Unknown header type 7f    ( This is the problem but I can't find the solution)
        Kernel modules: ath9k

iwconfig output:

root@bt:/usr/src/compat-wireless-3.3-rc1-2# iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

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