Wireless
 

I have a Cisco Aironet 350 Series PCMCIA wireless card. I just installed Slackware 9 on an old laptop and I can't figure out how to get the wireless card setup. Could anyone either point me to a good place to start or perhaps give a breif eplenation?

Thanks,

Wow, great friggin' card!

If you're getting module load on boot, airo_cs should be listed under "/sbin/lsmod"

If so, just use "iwconfig" to change all of the settings, the man page is rather well written, post back if you have any problems.

Cheers,

Finegan

"lo no wireless extension"
 

Thanks, I wasn't sure if Slack was initiazling the card or not. I've used this card a little under Windows, but for the most part I'm new to wireless networking.

What does "lo no wireless extrension" mean? The card is not picking up any wireless connections?

By the way, would I have to update the firmware for the card to be compatible with Linux?

Pcmcia should intialize the card as long as pcmcia started, which is Slack default on all installs... Is there a pcmcia bus read in "dmesg" at all? It'll look like:

It should have registered a device as eth0... if not, post back with the output of:

/sbin/cardctl ident

Cheers,

Finegan

eth0
 

It doesn't register as eth0.

/sbin/cardctl ident gives:

Socket 0:
product info: "Cisco Systems", "350 Series Wireless LAN Adapter"
manfind: 0x015f, 0x000a
function: 6 (network)
Socket 1:
no product info available

Is there a difference between firmware for Linux and Windows? The card currently has the firmware for Windows flashed into it.

Theoretically no, not as far as I know, if it doesn't even load the card though, this may be an issue with pcmcia instead of the card itself, there's an exact matching bind line in /etc/pcmcia/config:

so its doubtful that there's anything wrong with the card, what's "dmesg" say about it? Also, is Slack happy with other pcmcia cards?

Cheers,

Finegan

dmesg output
 

Linux Kernel Card Services 3.1.22
options: [pci] [cardbus] [pm]
isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards...
isapnp: No Plug & Play device found
Intel PCIC probe:
Intel i82365sl B step ISA-to-PCMCIA at port 0x3e0 ofs 0x00, 2 sockets
host opts [0]: none
host opts [1]: none
ISA irqs (scanned) = 3,4,5,7,9,10,12 status change on irq 10
cs: IO port probe 0x0c00-0x0cff: clean.
cs: IO port probe 0x0800-0x08ff: clean.
cs: IO port probe 0x0100-0x04ff: excluding 0x220-0x22f 0x320-0x337 0x378-0x37
f 0x388-0x38f 0x480-0x48f 0x4d0-0x4d7
cs: IO port probe 0x0a00-0x0aff: clean.
cs: memory probe 0x0d0000-0x0dffff: clean.
eth0: 3Com 3c589, io 0x300, irq 3, hw_addr 00:20:AF:F7:86:6E
8K FIFO split 5:3 Rx:Tx, auto xcvr
airo: Probing for PCI adapters
airo: Finished probing for PCI adapters
airo: Doing fast bap_reads
eth0: flipped to 10baseT
airo: Max tries exceeded waiting for command
airo: MAC could not be enabled
airo_cs: RequestConfiguration: Operation succeeded

This laptop is extremly old and has two pcmcia slots. I needed the ethernet adapter to post with a copy of dmesg.

So there is no configuration for an eth1 after that, it looks partially like it succeeded and partly like it failed, the airo_cs module looks to have loaded though, its definately not listed in "/sbin/lsmod"?

Doof, I just did some poking around and evidently you will need to set-up the card with cisco's own utilities the first time out, whcih evidetly doesn't mess with anything on the windows side, you can download the package from here:

http://www.cisco.com/pcgi-bin/Softwa.../wlplanner.cgi

Unfortunately its a cgi script so you'll have to use the dropdowns to get to the pcmcia utility called:

2002-05. 802.11b Radio Firmware 4.25.30, Linux Driver 2.0, Aironet Client Utility (ACU)

Cheers,

Finegan

ACU
 

Thanks, I'll give that a try as soon as I have time. I should have done that before I even came to this board. Hehe, woops. Well I've learned alot, thanks.

The installer requires the Linux source under /usr/src/Linux.Blah.Blah, but I dont have the source. I didn't install it, and according to the slackware site, the source software set is K. Yet I can't find any set named K on the slack 9 cd. How else could I get the source into my /usr/src dir?

Forget that last post, I got a hold of the source package. But I think the problem with the Cisco driver/utility package is that it's missing a shell script. Has anyone else had any probelms getting the latest Cisco Aironet driver/utility for the 350 installed and working?

Hi,

In my case, using Windows version of the Cisco ACU, I discovered that the 350 had firmware version 5.02.19. I'm running RedHat 9.0, and it would simply not recognize the card. I downloaded the firmware version 4.25.30 from the cisco website and used the Windows box to downgrade the 350, and now it seems to work fine on Linux. It's not Slackware, but the firmware downgrade might be relevant to all distributions.

Hope this helps,
john

I'll give that a try. Thanks.
If you remember, what kind of errors did you get when you tried to boot with the card?

Thanks a lot! That got my Aironet detected on boot. I had a feeling it might be a firmware problem.

Thanks again!