Lieven and others,

Hmmm.

Good news and bad news with the binary drivers. I managed to get them to
install relatively easily (although those of us with PCI/PCMCIA host
adapters rather than dedicated PCI cards probably should avoid the PCI
driver) ...

One machine (PIII laptop) seemed fine. A check with wireless extensions
showed all the parameters were OK.

The other machine (old Pentium) also appeared to startup fine, but when I
tried to bring the interface up I got the old "SIOADDRCRT: Network is
unreachable" error. However, everything looked fine. As soon as that card
saw any traffic (by pinging from the other machine for example) I watched
the shame of a kernel panic. This was kinda promising, since it only
occured when I initiated traffic on the laptop (remote wireless kernel
panics are a step above the normal console ones :-) ...

So, mixed success. My main server box at home is OpenBSD where there is
not yet support for the PrismII (although it is reportedly good in NetBSD
and there is some support in FreeBSD).

I might try installing NetBSD on the old Pentium next. The other half of
my brain has already suggested shelving the cards until linux-wlan
supports Ad-Hoc, or cutting my losses and buying an access point. I would
have considered the latter option earlier if I'd read the source
(or found the mailing list archive) earlier ... :-|

Anyhow ... that's where I've got to. Urgent work called me away from
sinking any more time into this. At least working will allow me to buy an
access point (recommendations anyone? I'd prefer something with an antenna
socket).

I do recommend trying the D-Link cards with this driver. I suspect my
kernel panic is related to the machine rather than the driver ...

Steps for making the D-Link work:

1. Get pcmcia-cs from SourceForge.
2. Untar swld11 (Samsung binary driver) tarfile into pcmcia-cs directory.
3. Install as per Samsung instructions.
4. Edit /etc/pcmcia/config and remove the configuration for the Wavelan
   card which points to 'manfid 0x0156, 0x0002' ... this is also the
   address used by the PrismII reference implementation and
   (apparently) by the D-Link cards.
5. Insert the following lines into /etc/pcmcia/config :

card "Intersil PRISM2 11Mb/s WLAN Card"
  manfid 0x0156, 0x0002
  bind "swld11_cs"

6. The 'card' line can include any name ... it is the manfid/bind
   combination which binds the driver to the card.
7. Make sure you include the options at the end of config.opts as detailed
   in the Samsung install procedure.
7a. NB: Any settings in wireless.opts won't be used unless that file is
    made executable. It is a little more readable, but the single line in
    the bottom of the config.opts seemed to do the setup fine.
7b. The Samsung driver complies with the 'Wireless Extensions'
    standard. This means you can set/query most basic operations of the
    card pretty easily. Grab the 'Wireless Tools' package.
8. Restart pcmcia services.
9. Insert card
10. Voila??

Let me know if there are specifics I can help out with, although my
failure to get both ends running might lead you to a more enlightened
source of wisdom ...

Geoff

PS I downloaded the drivers from Eric's mirror, since the Samsung site
    seemed a bit broken.

On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Lieven Van Acker wrote:

>
>
> Geoffrey King wrote:
>
> > Thanks very much, Eric. I'll give the Samsung driver a go ...
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm als in the situation of owning two D-Link Cards (DWL500/DWL650).
> Did you manage to get the binary driver from samsung? It seems I can't connect to
> their website. If someone found the link to this driver, or has one, can someone
> reply a location to get it from.
>
> And Geoffry, if you manage to make these cards work, I'll be very pleased to know!
>
> Lieven
>
> -----------------------------------------------
> The Linux WLAN User's Mailing List
> For more information about this list see:
> http://www.absoval.com/linux-wlan/lists.html
>

-----------------------------------------------
The Linux WLAN User's Mailing List
For more information about this list see:
http://www.absoval.com/linux-wlan/lists.html

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]