Proxim Orinoco Silver PCMCIA on RH9 w/ kernel 2.4.20-20.9
 

I just bought a proxim Orinoco Silver a/b/g PCMCIA (Model 8481-WD) for my laptop running rh9 with the 2.4.20-20.9 kernel. I was told that the Orinoco Silver card is the easiest to configure using redhat but I've had no luck with it so far as I don't have much experience with adding new hardware to Linux, I'm not even sure if Linux is logically aware of the card, when I reboot the computer with the card in it the card's Power LED will flick on for a moment and turn off again, it will do this periodically. I went to KDE's Control Center and went to the information section and clicked "PCMCIA" and it told me
Card 0: Cardbus hotplug device
I was told that redhat should recognize the card when I went to configure it for the network, but it didn't recognize the driver it needed. After I went to Network Configuration and selected Wireless Connection, the only option it gave me to choose from under Select Wireless Device was "Other Wireless Card" after clicking through, the dropdown had 3 adapters that started with Lucent Orinoco plus one that was Lucent/Agere, though two of the Orinoco selections were Prism2, and I am fairly sure the orinoco is a wavelan. I've tried all of them and after each configure I reset my pcmcia and network to make sure everything was being recognized. Every time I tired to activate the new connection (eth1, eth0 is my ethernet NIC) I get one of the following messages
wvlan_cs device eth1 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization.
orinoco_old_cs device eth1 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization.
etc etc...
I recieved a tip to install pcmcia-cs-3.2.5, which I did, but it apparently did not change anything. Does anyone have any other ideas?

You've been lied to! Well, probably not lied, but we've certainly confused you.

The original Lucent/Agere/ORiNOCO Silver & Gold cards used the Hermes chipset and are nearly fool-proof in a Red Hat 9.0 install. The new a/b/g cards use the Atheros chipset. There is a driver project at MADWiFi. I've not used it, but have read that it's pretty solid.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

thanks for that info, I downloaded the package from that site, but I don't really know how to use the drivers to activate the card. If it helps though this is the info that cardctl ident gave me

Socket 0:
product info: "Atheros Communications, Inc.", "AR5001-0000-0000", "Wireless LAN Reference Card", "00"
manfid: 0x0271, 0x0012
function: 6 (network)

Did you install the drivers? Any errors during the make or install?
After installing the driver, modprobe drivername as root.
Whatever the driver name is, modprobe will load it. If not, post any error messages.

modprobe and insmod gave me the same output
[magician@localhost driver]$ /sbin/insmod ath_pci.o
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_media_change
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_add_xrates
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ath_hal_mhz2ieee
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ath_hal_init_channels
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_new_state
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_media_status
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_add_rates
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_dump_pkt
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_media_init
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ether_sprintf
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_ifdetach
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_encap
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_ifattach
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_find_node
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_input
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol _ath_hal_attach
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ath_hal_detach
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ath_hal_probe
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_next_scan
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_chan2ieee
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_chan2mode
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ieee80211_iterate_nodes
ath_pci.o: unresolved symbol ath_hal_computetxtime

Also I wasn't able to do make/make install on the ath_hal driver because of this error
[magician@localhost ath_hal]$ make
uudecode < ../hal/linux/i386-elf.hal.o.uu
/bin/sh: line 1: uudecode: command not found
make: *** [hal.o] Error 127

OK:
1. You can't load a driver that's not installed and, since the make install failed ...
2. You appear to be trying to do the make install as a normal user. Do it as root.

I tried it as root and got the same type of error

Do you have the development packages installed? They are required to compile stuff.

l