I would like to load the orinoco module to do a netinstall of slackware. My problem is that slackware doesn't have a rootdisk that has support for the orinoco card. Is there anything that I can do?

Here is a place where you can download the orinoco driver source.

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

From there I guess you could insmod it and get everything working.

Hope this helps.

well, I compiled them, put the modules in /root/modules, and then copied the wavelan_cs.o file to a floppy.

From there I moved it onto the laptop I'm trying to do this on, and I ran "insmod wavelan_cs.o"

It didn't work...

This is the installation disk for slackware, very minimal kernel running.

You can't insmod a pcmcia module... you have to make the pcmcia.img disk, before starting the install, mount the pcmcia.img disk and go under its: lib/modules/2.4.20/kernel/drivers/net/pcmcia and just remove one or two of the ones you won't need and add in there a copy of the normal slackware 9.0 hermes.o, orinoco.o and orinoco_cs.o

Then, after booting with CD, or the floppy boot+2xrootdisks, after logging in as root, make certain the card is in there and then type the command "pcmcia". Now, make certain your wireless LAN is wide open as you're not going to have a chance to configure the card with iwconfig unless you want to make some statically compiled versions of wireless_tools and put them on another floppy.

Cheers,

Finegan

there ARE normal orinoco.o orinco_cs.o and hermes.o drivers? Where?

Well, I compiled the drivers on another machine, and gzipped them, and replaced the drivers on the floppy with the ones that I compiled on the other machine.

Now when I load the pcmcia floppy, I do get the "beep, boop" of a loaded card.... but no module is loaded, and I have no wi0.

This is starting to get very frustrating.

The lights on the orinoco card wouldn't even light up, so I tried a linksys wpc11 card. The LEDs light at least, but then I still don't get a wi0 ethernet interface... this is getting frustrating again, sleep didn't help too much.

The wi0 interface is the BSDs man, the orinoco cards... heck, the Linux standard is to name the devices after the service and not after manufacturer (or really, chipset), so you're looking for an eth0. Compiling on another machine might not work so hot as the modules aren't going to necessarily be synced with the kernel version. After booting hop over to another terminal, ALT+F2 and check "dmesg" to see what the verdict on the module load was. If its a mess of version symboling errors, try these:

http://www.clockwatching.net/~fin/or...orinoco.tar.gz

That's just a copy of the three I have in a stock slackware 9.0 install, so they should fit in happily with a stock bare.i

Cheers,

Finegan

Even the stock drivers on the pcmcia rootdisk got a bunch of symbol errors.

I'm running FreeBSD right now, but it isn't what I want to run.