I have a 3Com PCMCIA card that I am trying to get working with Fedora Core 1. I have a dual boot system with WinXP and the card works with WinXP on the same laptop. Here are my details:

Computer: Dell Inspiron 1150

PCMCIA Card (from "cardctl ident"):
Socket 0:
product info: "3Com", "3CRWE62092B Wireless LAN PC Card"
manfid: 0x0101, 0x0620
function: 6 (network)

OS: Fedora Core 1 (installed flawlessly on this laptop, BTW).

Card driver: atmel OS wlan driver (atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net/)

I got the driver (and apps) to compile and install. winter works, lvnet works, and the command "iwconfig" shows the following:

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

atml0 ATMEL RFMD ESSID:""
Mode:Managed Channel:4 Access Point: FF:00:00:00:00:00
Bit Rate:11Mb/s
RTS thr=2347 B Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption key:off
Link Quality:40 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

So, here's the problems:

1) The card does not work! I get a message repeated ad infinitum from dmesg:
----------------------------------------------------
**** BSS List is empty ****
----------------------------------------------------
NO APs in the List...
No BSS found. Re-Scan
WE ARE INSIDE Scan...
Start Scanning from Channel 4 - SSID(0):
Scan Command in Progress...
SCAN Completed...
0 Entries in BSS List:

----------------------------------------------------
**** BSS List is empty ****
----------------------------------------------------
NO APs in the List...
No BSS found. Re-Scan
WE ARE INSIDE Scan...
Start Scanning from Channel 4 - SSID(0):
Scan Command in Progress...

2) The LED on the card is off and stays off. The command "cardctl reset" will turn the LED on but the card stilll does not work. The following message appears in dmesg:

-> vnet_event(physical physical, 0, 0x00c7d0d9)
-> vnet_event(card reset, 0, 0x00c7d0d9)

Also, the "scanning..." commands stop in dmesg. (Looks like "cardctl reset" turns the card off?)

3) when shutting down the whole process halts until I physically eject the card. The same is true for boot -- X will not start (I boot into init 5) until I physically eject the card.

I read somewhere about IRQ conflicts but I can't find the info anymore. Is IRQ conflict resolution the right tree to bark up in this case?

Remember, all of the hardware is working fine -- it works under WinXP. Please help me! I desperately do not want to get rid of my Linux installation on this laptop!

Thanks!
-Jeff S.

Hi,

I think I just found a solution to this problem please find in Linux-Hardware a similar question by myself and a possible solution.

Cheers, Frank

Hello, I have some problems to configure this driver in my Fedora core 2.

But I tried to configure the driver with the LVNET tool, and always this crashes my system.

I configured it with iwconfig and it worked.

Well, I only need how to config the card with the network scripts.

bye

Hi,

It is not clear if you have a problem or not?

Anyway I got it working on Fedora Core 1 but for the time being I am too
lazy to move to Fedora Core 2 on that machine.
I would guess that this will still work on Fedora Core 2.

Therefore here again the way I got my card working:

*********************************************************************************************
Hi,

It may be of interest to others how I solved my problem:

0) The kernel of Fedora Core 1 as shipped is ready to install the atmelwlan driver.
However, the proper .config is needed in /usr/src/linux-2.4.22-1.2199.npt1/

1) Common to all atmelwlan drivers that I tested there is a following fix needed to avoid the "unresolved references" of "depmod -ae": In your directory XXX/atmelwlandriver/src/Pcmcia_Pci change the following lines of the "Makefile":

CFLAGS_$(CONFIG_MODVERSIONS):= -DMODULE -DMODVERSIONS -include $(KERNEL_SRC)/include/linux/modversions.h
CFLAGS := -DLINUX_OS -D__KERNEL__ -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Wno-trigraphs -O2 $(DEFS) -I$(KERNEL_SRC)/include -I$(INC) -I$(INC)/pcmcia $(CFLAGS_y)

to:

CFLAGS_$(CONFIG_MODVERSIONS):= -DMODULE -DMODVERSIONS -include $(KERNEL_SRC)/include/linux/modversions.h
CFLAGS := -DLINUX_OS -D__KERNEL__ -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Wno-trigraphs -O2 $(DEFS) -I$(KERNEL_SRC)/include -I$(INC) -I$(INC)/pcmcia $(CFLAGS_$(CONFIG_MODVERSIONS))

2) I did not managed to make use of the newer atmelwlna drivers like: atmelwlandriver-3.4.0.2.tar and this impression is confirm by other comments I found on the web.

Instead, I was successful with the older version atmelwlandriver.2.1.2.2.tar.

The difference between the seems the fact that the newer tries to use the atml0 device while the old one takes eth1. If somebody can tell me how the newer ones work I will be happy to try it out.

3) Comment:
a) The install process did not quite work so that I had to copy manually the XXX/atmelwlandriver/objs/pcmf502r3.o
to the target location: /lib/modules/2.4.22-1.2199.npt1/kernel/drivers/net/pcmcia/pcmf502r3.o.
b) Of course one needs a "alias eth1 pcmf502r3" entry in /etc/modules.conf

Thanks for reading!
***************************************************************************************************


Cheers, Frank