[TriLUG] wireless configuration problem

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Sun, 22 Jul 2007, Glenn Hennessee wrote:

> I ditched windows on my dell inspiron 8100 laptop and installed ubuntu
> desktop 7.04. I have a Proxim Orinoco silver 802.11b model 8421-WD
> pcmcia card.

I have the 8420-WD which is the gold. It's sitting in a 
windows laptop which is only used close to a WAP. I don't 
know if it (yours or mine) works in Linux. I haven't tried 
it as it's the worst piece of wifi hardware I have.

The much revered card from the early days is the regular 
Orinico gold/silver which is a different animal.

The proxim card has crappy hardware, with a crappy windows 
driver and didn't follow the wifi protocols real well. It 
was designed for executives knowing they couldn't tell if 
their card was crap. It was designed to grab market share 
back in the early days when there was no competition.

After accumulating quite a few nice b cards from the early 
days at about $70 a piece, I was surprised to find that you 
can get a nice TP Link g card from Intrex for only $30 which 
uses the madwifi drivers, which I'm happy with. (The price 
of early adoption.)

> cardctl ident gives
>
> "Agere Systems", "Wireless PC Card Model 0110", "", ""
> manfid: 0x0156, 0x0003
> function: 6 (network)
>
> ifconfig -a only shows the lo0 and eth0 (the built-in ethernet) interfaces.

I assume you have other pcmcia cards being detected and 
loading drivers?

> I am totally clueless how to proceed from here on making the card work
> with linux.

(if you have the pcmcia modules loaded) load every driver 
and see what happens

# cd /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless
# for file in *;do insmod $file;done
# cd -

(ignore complaints from drivers which can't find their 
hardware) now see if iwconfig or ifconfig finds anything new

do you know to connect to a wap if you have a working wifi 
card? - you'll need a script which feeds iwconfig the SSID, 
encryptions strings etc, then you'll need to bring up the 
wifi NIC, then you'll have to dhcpcd.

Joe

> I have spent several hours with google and turned nothing
> that made any sense to me. Does anyone have any suggestions? I wouldn't
> be averse to buying a new card if necessary.


> Thanks.
> glenn
>
>

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!