I've installed Debian Woody from the CD set on an old laptop. I'd like to use my Linksys WPC11 wireless networking card for the network connection.

I first tried to configure wired networking using an old 3COM card, but it wasn't recognized. So, I decided to just focus on getting the WPC11 working.

I've learned that what I need is the orinoco_cs driver, but I can't find it in the CD set. I tried:

apt-cache search orinoco

but all I get is:

"korinoco - Clone the "Client Manager" for Lucent Technologies, Inc.
wavemon - Wireless device monitoring application"

I suspected that what I might really need to do is configure the kernel. I thought I had installed with the 2.2 kernel, but an attempt to upgrade to the 2.4 kernel resulted in warnings that I was messing with the running kernel.

Can anyone offer suggestions?

Thanks!

Under 2.2 there is no in kernel module for prism2 chipset based cards. You could either apt-get up to a 2.4 kernel (and apt-get up to a realistically new pcmcia-cs), or find some of the really old source from the linux-wlan.net project. The orinoco_cs module didn't appear in pcmcia-cs or the kernel until around 2.4.7 and didn't support the prism series until about 2.4.11, and that was two and half years ago. The one thing I hate about Debian, stable as hell, archaic kernels that lead to no hardware support.

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks, Finegan. I reinstalled, using 2.4.something. I think it's 2.4.18. Anyway, it's on the 3.0r1 distribution disks as the "bf24" kernel option at installation time.

I ran insmod orinoco_cs, so now lsmod shows orinoco_cs as well as orinoco and hermes, but the card apparently isn't recognized. I get a low-pitched beep when I insert the card, instead of two high beeps.

I tried editing /etc/pcmcia/config and adding:
card "Linksys WPC11"
(there probably should have been version info here, but I don't have it)
manfid 0x0274, 0x1613
bind "orinoco_cs"

but I still get nothing but lo when I run ifconfig or iwconfig.

Maybe I should plug in the wired lan PCMCIA card and see if the 2.4 kernel recognizes it...

Oh. That worked. I've already messed up several config files and who knows what else in the new installation, so I'll start over using the 2.4 kernel (which seems to recognize my wired lan card). Then I'll be able to get updates directly from the net, and hopefully work toward recognition of the Linksys card. I'll post my results here when I'm done, in case someone else is curious, and/or having the same problem.

Yeah, on top of shipping an ancient kernel, Debian also comes with an ancient pcmcia-cs. Hand editing /etc/pcmcia/config will work, but you need to hard restart pcmcia to get cardmgr to re-read the file. Something like:

/etc/init.d/pcmcia restart

I think is where Debian stuck the script. Or.... you can download a copy of hermes.conf from:

http://ozlabs.org/people/dgibson/dldwd/

And just copy hermes.conf into /etc/pcmcia and then hard restart pcmcia.

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks, Finegan. Maybe I'll try it. I got frustrated yesterday and wiped the disk and installed Slackware. I see that Slackware 9.0 has a newer kernel (2.4.20), and it recognized my PCMCIA cards. (I get high notes for both cards in Slackware.)

I like Slackware's idea of keeping the distribution simple and not trying to second guess the user by adding extra layers of configuration files or GUI stuff that doesn't quite manage everything. But, I've never seen a "pure" Linux system, so I don't know how to deal with it. Most of my books lean toward managing Linux through some commercial distribution's GUI.

Can you recommend some good books (or online docs) on Linux that aren't distribution-specific, or that are reasonably recent and oriented towards Debian? I've found the Linux Cookbook online and plan to spend some time looking at it, and the Debian doc pages.

I'd like to have a distribution that I can use everywhere for everything (web server, desktop, wireless laptops, web app development), but I have philosophical objections to commercial distributions.

Debian just looked easier to manage remotely, at least initially. I see that you're partial to Slackware. I'll probably move over to the Slackware forum and ask some questions about security and updates over there.

Anyway, thanks for your help. I might wipe the Slackware off and reinstall Debian now that I've got a clear answer to my wireless card problem, or I might wipe the Red Hat or SuSE partitions of another laptop and replace that with Debian.

(I've installed Mandrake, SuSE, Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, looking for the distribution that comes closest to meeting my criteria. Debian still looks pretty good, but Slackware may deserver further study. Mostly, I want to have the local computers here match the web server as closely as possible, and I can get Debian managed hosting at ServerBeach for a reasonable rate.)

I initially didn't like Debian mainly due to its installer... it was a nightmare, and when I was a newbie the quick and simple text layout of Slackware seemed to be much easier to get along with, and it is, for install... later I began to not like Debian because of how bloody archaic they kept stable, almost really to the point where having a "stable" was pointless if it couldn't run on anything but 3 year old hardware, but actually... everyone I know who runs Debian, runs "unstable", its almost a joke actually, and they're "unstable" is really really really stable, although installing that is a bit of a hastle too, but the payoff of apt-get is pretty much worth it. You can also just cheat your way to an unstable by installing Knoppix and then "apt-get remove"'ing your way down to just what you need. There are also the pseudo-commercial packagings of Debian, Lycoris is one of them if I remember right, but I've never fiddled with them, you could find out a lot more in the Deb forum.

Make no mistake, Slackware is a commercial distro... just one with 4 maintainers, and the primary one of whom, Patrick, is a badass. The pkg system of Slackware has absolutely NO dependency checking, which I really like. Seems backwards huh? You gotta remember that once you lock yourself into rpm or apt or whathaveyou, when you need to tweak something weird its a fight between you and the package management system. Slackware just gives you an incredibly stable DIY platform to build whatever you need. Minus the fact that it uses a BSD-ish init structure instead of sysV it really feels the most like a "generic" Linux system after you've played distro ping-pong for a few years.

I'd recommend checking into Gentoo... I've slowly started switching all of my desktop and laptops to it. The "emerge" system works really well for when you need an app optimized to the gills and want it there, basically Debian's apt with some compile time overhead and everything a little more bleeding edge, even more so then Deb unstable. Install can be time consuming for a stage 1 and a stage 2, and a stage 3 really flushes half the reasoning for installing Gentoo, which is that you feel like the machine has twice the ram and another 1/3 of the clock rating then it did with a different distro. I'm not switching my servers to it, I'll stick to Debian, Slackware... and no kidding, the security of OpenBSD is amazing. FreeBSD is also excruciatingly more security concious then most distros (including Slackware, which is really a bit of a breeze as Patrick likes to either cut down daemons to not be able to do potentially stupid stuff or... doesn't include it at all). I just for some bizzare reason of taste don't like FreeBSD, chalk it up to personal taste, nothing more, its brilliantly stable. An example of the former is his sleek compiling of OpenSSH once that kept slackware immune to a huge hole that effected everyone else, an example of the later being absolutely no PAM support... that has had numerous issues throughout time).

Fedora might turn out to be a good choice, they're going for the "apt"-ability of Debian, the GUI interfaces of SuSe, but still with all of the command line functionality. Its a wait and see though... Core 1 just came out, I haven't tried it, but I've got other things I wanted to fiddle with first.

As far as reading goes... I dunno, I borrowed a copy of "Running Linux" by Matt Welsch about three years ago and then just started installing everything on anything I had lying around or could cobble together, whatever I had to look up online I did. Some ideas... The entire samba manual from O'Reilly is online as a freebie in PDF. The tldp of course, but some of their docs are dreadfully old... just google for whatever interests you, thats how I first ended up with a software RAID set-up. A good LUG helps too, Linux geeks love to talk, especially to anyone that'll listen...

My greatest learning experience... LFS. You really get to see how everything is tied together. I would never try to build a workstation out of it again, but you could make a very lean and hearty server out of it.

Sorry, bored at work I rambled quite a bit.

Also, When you load that prism card, check "dmesg" for what version of the orinoco_cs driver loaded, if its .13b don't worry, but .11b had a lot of issues with prism2 firmware timeout bugs, the source for just the module is available at the link above, and always compiles cleanly for me on slack. If you ever notice a download that should be at a full 11Mbs throttle down to like 20kbs, then check "dmesg" for Error -6 Timeout waiting for BAP or somesuch, then you might want to upgrade drivers.

Luck,

Finegan

Whew! You can type! Thanks for the long message. There's a lot of useful stuff there.

I was impressed with OpenBSD's security, too. I'd probably run it everywhere if everything ran on it without hassles. It seems like a decent organization, and they write nice, clear documentation. I'd still be playing with some BSD variant, but, I got crosswise with FreeBSD's update process pretty early in the game, and filled up a hard disk while trying to learn to use CVSup. That, coupled with the lack of Java support in the 5.x versions and the lack of wireless support and ACL support in the 4.x versions led me to question whether a BSD variant was the right direction. I finally decided to move a little more in the direction the masses were moving, so I started looking at more popular distributions. Still, I may look at OpenBSD again sometime, or even try out NetBSD. NetBSD is the one I didn't try, and it's the one that is supposed to have lots of weird device support.

I just checked out Gentoo's website. It sounds like it's worth a look. I'll have to read their general philosophy pages and try to get a handle on their mindset. I don't know, though, I've spent way too much time going back and forth between distributions. It's time to pick one arbitrarily and stick to it no matter how inadequate and inappropriate it is.

It looks like Debian's APT system is versatile enough that I can configure it to dodge my tweaks, if I'm really careful. It looks like I'm going to have to document and copy every change I make, though, as insurance against messing up.

Anyway, thanks for the continued help with the wireless card. I'll try to get back here and post of summary if I get it to work.