Hello all, I'm new to the board, I'm a Linux amateur (a little more than a newbie), so please take it easy.

I have RH Linux 9 with the newer Kernel patch:
Linux night.(domain blocked) 2.4.20-19.9 #1 Tue Jul 15 17:18:13 EDT 2003 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

I have a TRENDWare TEW-223PI which is based on the ADMTek 8211 (v17 firmware) chip for 802.11b 11mbps wireless. It's a PCI card.

lspci -v returns:
02:02.0 Network controller: Linksys: Unknown device 8201 (rev 11)
Subsystem: Abocom Systems Inc: Unknown device ab60
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10
I/O ports at de00 [size=256]
Memory at fe9dbc00 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
Expansion ROM at fea00000 [disabled] [size=128K]
Capabilities: [c0] Power Management version 2

I download the ADMTek 1.05 drivers (src), compiled and insmod'd the driver for testing and in the Kernel I see:

Aug 15 23:58:22 night kernel: ADM8211 Linux driver version 1.05 (June 24, 2003)
Aug 15 23:58:22 night kernel: 8211: Hardware Address 00:E0:98:AB:36:EE, IRQ 10.
Aug 15 23:58:23 night kernel: eth1: ADMtek Wireless rev 17 at 0xde00
Aug 15 23:58:23 night /etc/hotplug/net.agent: invoke ifup eth1

(eth1 is the wireless card, eth0 is my built-in gigabit NIC)

Everything looks fine, I don't see any problems.

I run iwconfig:

eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"" Nickname:""
Mode:Managed Channel:0 Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Bit Rate=0kb/s Tx-Power=0 dBm Sensitivity:0/65535
Retry limit:3 RTS thr=2346 B Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

I run "iwconfig eth1 essid "MyESSID"" and no errors

I run iwconfig again and I get the same results. No change.

I try to change the channel to 6 (my AP's channel) and no change.

Now, with the driver I downloaded from TRENDWare (I think it's the 1.03 driver),

I could try iwconfig eth1 commit and nothing would happen.

Eventually I'd start seeing a bunch of this in my log:
Aug 15 23:39:47 night kernel: set channel 1
Aug 15 23:39:48 night kernel: set channel 2
Aug 15 23:39:48 night kernel: set channel 3
Aug 15 23:39:48 night kernel: set channel 4
Aug 15 23:39:48 night kernel: set channel 5
Aug 15 23:39:48 night kernel: set channel 6
Aug 15 23:39:49 night kernel: set channel 7
Aug 15 23:39:49 night kernel: set channel 8
Aug 15 23:39:49 night kernel: set channel 9
Aug 15 23:39:49 night kernel: set channel 10
Aug 15 23:39:49 night kernel: set channel 11


Now, with the 1.05 driver, I just did a commit and I got this:
Error for wireless request "Commit changes" (8B00) :
SET failed on device eth1 ; Operation not supported.

So I'm not sure if that's better or worse.

Anyone have any clue what is going on and how I can get this thing to work with my Linux?

Thank you VERY much in advance.

Hey daz0r,

I'm in exactly the same boat as you - with the same card and RedHat 9.

I was wondering if you had made any progress, I'm tearing hair out over this one!

Phil.

I was setting up a media PC with Linux and I gave up on Linux. Linux still isn't there yet as far as I'm concerned I installed an MSDN copy of Windows XP Media Center Edition and now everything works like a champ.

The last thing I did do was to contact Abocom support and have them send me drivers. Apparently they are the root of the ADMTek chips or something. I had read on various forums that those seem to work in RH9. Hope that helps. I emailed:
allenh-REMOVE-ME-4-SPAM-PROTECTION@abocom.com.tw

And told him I had a WB200 wireless card and RH9 and he sent me some drivers.

Hey daz0r,

Yeap, I did exactly what you did again...!

Abocom are the people who took the 8211 chip and made a card from it, called the WP2000. Its this card which has been resold by various different companies.

*Sigh* - still not working though!

Phil.

try giving this card an ipaddress via ifconfig before attempting to iwconfig it, sometimes this helps.

I have one of these cards as well, and while I eventually managed to get it working, it still drops out of the wireless network at random intervals (using both 103 and 105 drivers). I am not using it in an infrastructure mode, but in an ad-hoc one.

I had alot of trouble with the driver(s) released on this card. I honestly can't remember what combination of stuff I did that got it working as well as it does.

My best suggestion is to return this card and buy one that has open-source driver support. I've contacted both Trendware and tried contacting ADMtek and was not able to resolve the problems with this driver.

One tip I have learned on this driver, after bringing the card up with ifup, if you are using encryption, you must set the encryption key again.

Here is a copy of my /etc/sysconfig/ifcfg-eth1 file if it helps:
DEVICE="eth1"
BOOTPROTO="none"
IPADDR="192.168.247.1"
NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
NETWORK=192.168.247.0
BROADCAST=192.168.247.255
ONBOOT="yes"
MII_NOT_SUPPORTED="NO"
WIRELESS_CHANNEL=4
WIRELESS_MODE="Ad-Hoc"
WIRELESS_ESSID=wireless_net
WIRELESS_RATE="auto"

I know I haven't been much help, but I'm fairly tired of dealing with the issues associated with this driver and intend on replacing it with a netgear as soon as possible.

(The card itself seems to work fine under windows, so the driver is the real problem here)

Nightjester Thraeryn

dazor, I have this exact same card, it works flawlessly with slackware 9.0, do you have it working yet?

Hey akaBeaVis,

Out of interest, what kernel are you running on? I am on a custom compiled 2.4.21 on RedHat 9.

Thanks for any info you can provide - I'm going on a mission to try and get this thing working!

Phil.

I run only "stock" kernels on all distros (except mandrake 8.2, which is 2.4.21-pre2-something) for a couple of reasons, first, I have not needed any features/benefits thus far that aren't supported in the stock kernels and second, it's much more difficult to help people here who are using stock kernels when mine is custom, and unfortunately, the reverse is also true: helping someone with a custom kernel is difficult because you never know what they've compiled into the kernel, what they've left as modules and what they've left out completely.

Anyway to finally answer the question, the stock kernel for slack9 is 2.4.20. As for more info, I outlined the entire procedure I used for this card(tew-223pc) and slack9 in this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...599#post464599
hope this helps.

I use a Micronet wireless card that has the ADMTEK 8211 chip and Im using 1.05 drivers. Im also running RedHat 9.0 with the 2.4.2 kernel I found you have to firstly give the card an IP address using ifconfig e.g
ifconfig eth1 10.0.0.1
Then I found that your wireless card has to be disabled to configure it so
ifconfig eth1 down
Then I could configure it however e.g
iwconfig eth1 essid mylan

And then enabling it again (ifconfig eth1 up) the card would be configured with the new settings
That stuff you are getting in your log i.e set channel 1, set channel 2 etc is because by default the card is set to channel 0 which is auto frequency mode where it just cycles through the frequencies. This is really bad since two wireless cards have to be on the same ferquency to transmit and receive from each other so if two cards are both set to this auto frequency then it is only at the times they both happen to be on the same frequency that they can send and receieve to each other and so the network performance is really bad and sometimes simple things such as ping doesnt even work and you may get duplicate ping problems. Its best to set all your cards to a single frequency to avoid all these problems.

I too had problems using this card. On boot up the wireless connection does not work most of the time. It requires a couple of reboots to make the connection work. That is using the 1.05 drivers and running on 2.4.20-8.

Updating to kernel 2.4.20-20.9 and wireless_tools.26 coupled with 1.05 drivers fix my problems.

I have similar problems, with RH 7.3 on which the standard drivers should work. Well they do, but only for a limited time and then you need to reactivate the WEP key.

MINOR PROBLEM BUT POSSIBLY RELATED?
First I can't seem to get the card detected automatically on boot, so I have to insmod -f 8211.o from rc.local. I have my ifconfig done afterwards without trouble, and also the iwconfig gives no problems. Only warnig is with iwconfig eth1 txpower 15, that the module was compiled with version 12, while the wireless extensions used are version 13. In the end iwconfig shows:

eth1 IEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"wili" Nickname:""wili2"
mode: Ad-Hoc Frequency: 2.412GHz Cell: 02:09:91:67:B3:64
Bit Rate=11Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:0/65535
retry limit: 3 RTS thr=2346 B Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption key: 0000-0000-00 Encryption mode: open
Power Management: off
Link Quality: 0 Signal level: 0 Noise level: 0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

ifconfig and route show normal connection parameters.

REAL PROBLEM
But more importantly, after correct configuration of the card it wil sustain a ping over quite a period, but then wil report some kind of refresh: set channel 1. After which the card seems to loose the WEP key and the connection. If I do a iwconfig eth1 key 0000-0000-00 again the connection will continue to work. Apparently setting the essid without setting the WEP key loses the connection. If done manually it will also loose the connection, but this can be fixed by resetting the WEP key always afterwards as well. The problem is that the card seems to reinitialize the essid sometimes by itself. Then all is stuck. I tried to shutdown all powersaving modi (bios, iwconfig eth1 power off, killed apmd) but can't seem to find the trigger.

I compiled the sources 1.05 myself, but this driver seems to have the same problem. So far I'm out of options so I'm thinking if it would be possible to alter the driver a bit, to do a reinsert of the key automatically after every insert of the essid. I am very rusty however on the c-language and have never programmed in modules before. Anybody suggestions or help?