Digital Indigo
digitalindigo.comHomeAbout UsContact UsSearch

Clients
Client Login
Portfolio
Tech Support
Services
Pricing
Software
Internet Services
Web Hosting
Consulting
Programming

Quick Search




Red Hat Wireless LAN Network Setup (PCMCIA Version)

Introduction
Wireless LAN card setup, particularly using PCMCIA cards can initially seem difficult due to countless documents on the Internet. In essence, getting your wireless PC card to work with Linux requires you to have the appropriate module for your card's chipset, and to associate that module with the card, based on the card's manufacturer and product ID's.

Device names
Some people like to call their network card devices wlan0. This tends to sometimes add confusion to the matter. If all is setup properly on your Linux machine, wireless cards will show up as any other ethernet device: /dev/eth0 (or eth1, eth2, ...) From that point they can be setup by the system like any other network card.

Device names
Below is an example of a wireless PC Ethernet (802.11b) card we recently got for a laptop. The product in this example was a Netgear MA401. It only was claimed to be support Win 95/B, 98, Me, NT, 2000, and XP. But we wanted it to run under Red Hat Linux, too. So here's how we got it to work. This example can be applied to various wireless PC cards with little or no modifications.

Cardctl
Cardctl is the Linux program to identify PCMCIA devices. To see a list of PCMCIA cards type the command "cardctl ident". As shown below, the sample computer has a Netgear MA401 11Mbps PCMCIA Wireless Card in it.

It's important to make a note of the line that begins with "manfid". The first set of numbers is the manufacturer number, followed by the unique identity of this card model. These are the numbers Linux uses to configure the card during setup.

[root@localhost root]# cardctl ident
Socket 0:
product info: "NETGEAR MA401RA Wireless PC", "Card", "ISL37300P",
"Eval-RevA"
manfid: 0x000b, 0x7300
function: 6 (network)
Socket 1:
no product info available

Getting it to work...
Sometimes it takes a little digging around on the Internet to find out what driver to associate with a particular card. And sometimes it just takes some guesswork. In our case we decided to try the popular orinoco_cs driver. This driver works with many popular Wireless PCMCIA Ethernet adapters. However there are others, too, such as the pcnet_cs driver. Be sure to find out what your card needs... or try taking a guess!

We created a file called /etc/pcmcia/netgear.conf. In that file we put the text that follows:

card "Intersil PRISM2 11 Mbps Wireless Adapter"
manfid 0x000b, 0x7300
bind "orinoco_cs"

This was the equivalent of putting the text in the /etc/pcmcia/config file, but keeps things a bit more organized. (The /etc/pcmcia/config and all files that end in a .conf extension are all interpreted as one big file during startup.)

Now when our system boots up it will detect our Netgear card with the manufacturer ID 0x000b, and the product ID 0x7300. According to the netgear.conf file, it knows to recognize this card with the orinoco_cs driver. Provided the network configuration is set up properly, your card will be loaded up as eth0.

Additional Notes
Some PCMCIA drivers are still in development and may have slight quirks. Under Red Hat 7.2, our Netgear card ran fine, until we did very heavy transfers. At that point it would drive the softIRQ process crazy, and the card would lose connectivity. An upgrade to Red Hat 7.3 cured the problem. (Of course you can realize equal effects by installing a newer kernel on an older version of Linux.)

Related Topics & Information
netconfig Configuration of a network card.
   

 

Copyright © 1995-2007 Digital Indigo Technologies. All Rights Reserved.