Orinoco Gold PCMCIA Card. Need help installing the driver (orinoco_cs)
 

Hello.

I have a Dell XPS T450 with Fedora Core 6. The installed Orinoco Gold pcmcia wireless card doesn't seem to work with any of the drivers included with the distribution, so I searched around to find a compatible driver. I downloaded "orinoco-0.15.tar.gz" and unpacked it with the tar command. When I ran "make", I got this:

[root@****** orinoco-0.15]# make
make -C /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-i686 M=/root/Desktop/orinoco-0.15 KERNELRELEASE=2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-i686'
/root/Desktop/orinoco-0.15/Kbuild:38: *** This driver is already enabled in the kernel. Stop.
make[1]: *** [_module_/root/Desktop/orinoco-0.15] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-i686'
make: *** [modules] Error 2
[root@****** orinoco-0.15]#

Does anybody have any ideas? A guideline "step-by-step" kind of guide would be apprectiated also.

Thanks in advance.

Jake

According to that (red-coloured text), your kernel already has that driver enabled. Have you made sure it's loaded when you insert the card?
Here 'lsmod' lists loaded modules while grep (to which the output is piped) searches for lines that contain 'orinoco' and prints only them on the screen. If you get output, the driver is loaded and your problems are somewhere else (wrong driver, wrong wireless configuration, ...) If you don't get output, the driver could still be compiled directly into the kernel (not as a separate module) or then there's something wrong here..

A good way to test if a wireless card has a (loaded) driver in the system is to run
with root privileges (replace wlan0 with eth1 or whatever your wireless device is called if you need to). Either it shows results (= card is working) or you get an error (no networks available means the card works; anything else might mean trouble with drivers).

After you extract the source code you should read any INSTALL and/or README files inside the archive. There are instructions for installing the driver. The usual way to go (but not always the way to go) is this:
- make sure that you have kernel source code present on your system matching your running kernel version, if it is needed
- run the configure script from the source code directory (as regular user):
- if it does not succeed, fix any errors, then re-run. When it succeeds, proceed to running the make utility (as regular user):
- if it does not succeed, fix any errors, then re-run (maybe configure too). When it succeeds, either run the install target if such is present and you need to run it (this one with root privileges):
or -- because sometimes there is no install target -- follow any "manual" installation instructions to place the compiled driver file(s) to proper places on the filesystem. Then try
to load the module; in some cases (like graphics card drivers) you might need to reboot your system to get them load properly.

I'll experiment some more when I have time, as I am very busy at the moment. Thanks for your help.