February 17, 2010

Which wireless driver does your wireless card uses on Fedora and Ubuntu?

If you have a new Fedora user (or user of any other distro) who has problems using his wireless card first thing you need is for him to tell you which wireless card he has and which wireless driver his card uses. For experienced users this is trivial and can be done in several ways. I found that this can be a bit tricky for new users and there isn't one simple command that displays ONLY this information.

This one liner seams to do the trick for PCI wireless cards:

lspci -k|grep -i -E "wireless|wlan|802.11" -A 2

UPDATE:

Also try this command:
lshw -class network |grep -i 'description: wireless' -A 11

BROADCOM:
30:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)
	Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge
	Kernel modules: ssb

INTEL:
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG 
Network Connection (rev 02)
	Kernel driver in use: iwl3945
	Kernel modules: iwl3945

ATHEROS:
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg 
Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)
	Kernel driver in use: ath_pci
	Kernel modules: ath5k, ath_pci

INTEL:
3:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection (rev 61)
     Kernel driver in use: iwlagn
     Kernel modules: iwlagn

I tried this with Intel, Atheros and Broadcom wireless cards. Do you know of a better way to do this? How would you do this for USB wireless cards?