I work for the tech office at my school and they loan out wireless cards for the year. I have 2 choices in cards and here they are:
Proxim Orinoco silver IEE 802.11b model:8421-WD
Lucent Orinoco silver with external antenna port

I tried the lucent card first but when i would boot the machine would lock when cardmanager would try to load modprobe orinoco_cs. If i put it in while it was on then it locked completely.

So next i tried the Proxim and during boot it is only reported as not supported but the machine does not lock.

What module do i need to load for this proxim card? Can some one step me through getting this to work? I have searched forums for a week and not found a solution and more or less become more confused. I can get a wired card to work so i know that the pcmcia bus is good.
My Specs:
Compaq armada 7800
Slackware 9

Thanks

Ok i guess i will be replying to myself in this thread. Maybe some one is listening at least.

Any ways i gave up on the cards that the school loans out and decided to buy my own. From what i could tell the linksys WPC11 is well supported under linux and it has a prism chip set (2.5 in ver3). I made sure it said version3 on the card after i bout it. It was the last one with an older looking box on the shelf so i guess the version3s are scarce.

So i try it with a whole new fresh slackware install. Nothing special happens except it does not freeze my laptop but it also does not work. It tries to modprobe the wlan-ng module then gives errors. I played with that for a wile and gave up on getting it to work with that driver. So i decided to try to use the hostap driver instead. Compile and install went ok and i had no errors. I restarted cardmgr simply by rebooting and now it freezes again on boot only not like the orinoco card. When it gets to here:

hostap_cs: 0.04 - 2003-07-27 (Jouni Malinen <jkmaline@cc.hut.fi>
hostap_cs: index 0x01: Vcc 5.0, irq 3, io 0x0100-0x013f
hostap_cs: Registered netdevide wlan0
hostap_cs: Initialization failed
cardmgr[54]: executing: ' ./network start wlan0'
wlan0: interrupt delivery does not seem to work

it crashes.

Please some one help the windows zealots are beginning to laugh at me. Many of them have suggested that i "need to run windows on it"

Jim

Have you tried the other modules, wavelan_cs or wvlan_cs for the Lucent Orinoco Silver card? I recently got my Orinoco gold working with the wvlan_cs module.

I know a few who have used the Orinoco Silver in Redhat without any problems....I would assume it was also using the orinoco_cs module.

Hope that I will be able to respond to all your queries 'coz that's my job !!!!!!!!!!!!!

I would like to tell you that 8420-wd and 8421-wd cards does not support Linux operating system but the Orinoco Silver cards support Linux and for the drivers for this card please visit the following link (Please copy the complete link if it comes in two lines):

http://www.proxim.com/support/all/or...card_v616.html

Regards,
Rohit Sharma
Proxim Tech Support.

Ya sorry i should have made a post along time ago to finish this thing. Just for any one who is having a similar problem hears is what i did.

Discovered that the card slot on my compaq armada was a 16 bit. You see this causes a small problem because all the cards i tried were 32 bit cards. I feel like a real dumb a$$ now. Any one else who is having a similar problem should check this out. I never even thought i just assumed it was 32 bit slot.


Thanks for all your help thought every one..... wait it was only 2 ppl. Any ways thanks to those 2 ppl who actually posted something and were there for support.

jim

Proxim (Newbie) Rohit: 1) Thanks for the link am about to take the Orinoco plunge. 2) FYI you said the 8421 doesn't work w/Linux but Silver does, last time I looked the 8421 was a Silver. 3) How about Kismet, any compatibility problems ?

Jim64: Don't feel like the Lone Ranger, it's part of the learning process (provided we don't repeat them). :-)