I am about to go crazy with this problem, so hopefully someone here can help me. I've only had experience with Linux for about a week, and that was mainly just clicking on icons in KDE, so if possible please keep the Linux jargon to a minimal .

What I am trying to do is get my WMP11 installed under Mandrake 9.0 (I have the ISOs downloading right now and I don't expect that it will auto-detect the card) so that I will be able to browse the internet and not need to have a 98SE/Linux Dual-boot system. I have gone to linux-wlan.org and downloaded the linux-wlan-ng-0.1.9.tar file, and extracted it on my XP desktop to read the README file in hopes that it would help. It didn't... I've also looked at the Linux Networking HOWTO (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Net-HOWTO/) which didn't help my problem either. The only information I've been able to gather is:

• Linksys used to point to linux-wlan.com as location for Linux Driver

And that is really about it...I know that the WMP11 used to be PrismII based, but with one of the newer versions, the PrismII drivers no longer work (I have no idea which verion I have...Any way to tell?) If anyone could walk me through how to set it up or at least give me a better idea of how to configure all of the files that will need manual configuring, I would appreciate it so much. Thanks.

Do yourself a big favor and take a look at the wireless card to see what version it is.....if you see 2.7 anywhere on it you are out of luck for now as the card has a Broadcom 4301 chipset that does not have Linux driver support as of this writing. The v2.5 and earlier units will use the wlan-ng stuff and there are some very good and easy to use packages out there for prism2_pci and prism2_plx users.....

/sbin/lspci

If it mentions Broadcom under Ethernet Controller, then its the WPC11 v2.7

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks--Next time I get some free time, I'll open up my computer and take a look...Wish I still had the boxes....

I have a WMP11 with the Prism chipset (not the broadcom one), and still had trouble with getting it to work. I don't know why, but the hardware detection routines weren't able to configure the device and choose drivers.

I tried linux-wlan-ng. I could never get a reasonable kernel compiled, trying to build from the Mandrake 9 kernel sources plus linux-wlan. Also, I could never get the PCI stuff to work. Support for PCMCIA (the card manager) seemed to always interfere, even though I was working on a desktop PC with no PCMCIA.

I tried hostap. I could almost get that to work, but I could never get the card configured right for a stable connection.

Then someone kindly put me straight and got me to use the orinoco_pci driver. There are still soem rough spots (the connection goes on the blink periodically and I have to rmmod and reinstall the drivers), but the connection works fine now. So you might try that.

The orinoco modules that shipped with the 2.4.19 kernel are still a little old, the issues with slow transfer times and huge frame errors got knocked out with the .13 series of the driver, you've got .11b, you can download the newer set right from the maintainer:

http://ozlabs.org/people/dgibson/dldwd/

unpack, make, make install... nothing funky.

Cheers,

Finegan

Thank you very much for this update. Very useful information and I'll go look for those drivers.

Best,
R

I downloaded the new drivers, and when I tried to make the file, i got this error...

cc -MD -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -pipe -D__KERNEL__ -DPCMCIA_DEBUG=1 -DMODULE -DEXPORT_SYMTAB -I/lib/modules/2.4.18-14/build/include -c hermes.c
make: cc: Command not found
make: *** [hermes.o] Error 127

Is my kernel old? I have gotten my WMP11 to work, but it crashes alot. I'd like this one to work.

Thanks

Nope, nothing to do with kernel at all, you don't have a compiler!

2.4.18-14... RH 8.0 or 7.3? doesn't matter really, regardless, pop in the RH install CD, the first one I think, and try using that GUI software manager to install gcc, which should grab the 3-4 dependencies you need... it'll take up about 200+ megs of space. RH, being weenies, stopped putting a compiler on in back in 6.2 as part of the Default Install... If you have to rpm everything by hand:

rpm -Uhv gcc.whatever

and then it'll grouch about dependencies and you'll have to install them first... it can be a hastle.

Also, if you are using up2date, turn off updating the kernel as the next time it does this you'll boot to a new compile of 2.4.18 with the same old orinoco .11b modules... updating the kernel doesn't actually get you a newer kernel, just a different compile of the same old kernel.

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks alot with that one.

I installed a compiler and was able to install the new drivers. It looks like it is going to work.

Thanks again

For my next question...

It doesn't seem to activate at startup. When booting my RH8.0 system, I get 1 failure stating something to the effect "brining up eth0 failed. prism doesn't seem to be there, delaying startup." I then have to maunally bring eth0 up by modprobe, ifconfig, ect. Any way I can get eth0 to come up at the start?

It's just a pain having to log in as root, bring it up, then log out and continue my day...

edit /etc/modules.conf and add the line:

alias eth0 orinoco_pci

If there's a line there for eth0 already, its because the wlan-ng modules changed it.

Then hand edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts for icfg-eth0 and the one for wireless, and put in your specific settings... or, the nice quick and dirty hackish way!

edit /etc/rc.d/rc.local

and just put in there line by line whatever you have to do from the command line after boot. rc.local is the last init script to run on boot.

Cheers,

Finegan

Alright, I did edit the modules file...

One more thing. I am still have the drivers crash. I am getting an error as I shutdown and reboot...

Error 110 writing TX to BAP or something along those lines. Any idea what THAT means?

Thanks again

That is quite curious, are you certain you're using the new drivers set? It might have installed the new orinoco_pci somewhere funky, when in doubt, just check dmesg and it'll have the version of the module loaded. Also, if you could post what firmware you have... I was pretty certain the .13beta took care of this, it would be a bummer if I was wrong.

However, no matter what I know that the host_ap modules will work now, and now that you have a compiler, that's another incredibly easy package to compile...

Cheers,

Finegan

Alright, here is what dmesg said...

Detected Orinoco/Prism2 PCI device at 00:09.0, mem:0xCDDFF000 to 0xCDDFFFFF -> 0xcc8d0000, irq:5
Reset done................................................................................................ .................................................................................................... .......................................................;
Clear Reset............................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... ........;
pci_cor : reg = 0x0 - 481D - 471D
divert: allocating divert_blk for eth0
eth0: Station identity 001f:0002:0001:0004
eth0: Looks like an Intersil firmware version 1.04
eth0: Ad-hoc demo mode supported
eth0: IEEE standard IBSS ad-hoc mode supported
eth0: WEP supported, 104-bit key
eth0: MAC address 00:06:25:09:73:E2
eth0: Station name "Prism I"
eth0: ready
eth0: Channel out of range (0)!

I have no idea what most of this means.

Still getting the error 110.

Thanks