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. |
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