I recently installed Slackware 9.1 on my laptop. The only problem I am having is with my MA401 wireless card. I initially tried to put it in monitor mode with the original orinoco_cs driver, but it wasn't supported.

I patched the driver and now under the iwpriv section it has this ioctls value:

monitor (8BE8) : set 2 int & get 0

I then try and issue a iwconfig eth1 mode monitor and I get:

Error for wireless request "Set Mode" (8B06) :
SET failed on device eth1 : Invalid argument.

I know the card works because if I specifically make my SSID mywireless and then do a dhcpcd eth1 it will connect to my AP.

One last bit of information that might help, if I plug the card in and boot it works just fine, but if I plug it in after boot, while it is recongized it does not get an ip unless I set the SSID and then do dhcpcd eth1.

I'm kind of lost as to what to do now, I've googled and scanned these forums for sometime, only one other person had my problem, but no one responded to him. Any help would be appreciated greatly. Thanks.

Be sure to double check the card and make sure it is not a Prism chip.

http://mysite.verizon.net/res183uh/toshiba.html

Now that is interesting. I did a google search and it appears that the MA401RA used a prism chipset indeed. From what I can tell off of google I should be using the wlan-ng drivers instead. Thank you for the help. I never realized that there were two kinds of MA401 devices.

Victory is mine!!!

Once I found out that my MA401 was really a MA401RA and that orinoco was probably not the best driver to be using, I tried the wlan-ng. I didn't get the results I wanted out of that, but I was pointed in the direction of the hostap drivers. Those work like a charm. For anyone running Slackware 9.1 and perhaps later as well as current, I would try using the hostap drivers if your using a card that using the prism2 chipset.

Special thanks to Beyer42 for making me questions what my card was.