Red Hat 9 not recognizing my Belkin Wifi card

penguinpower77 · 01-03-2004, 09:31 PM

I have RH9 on a P2 450 and a Belkin wireless router and a belkin wireless card the problem is that my RH box isnt recognizing my new card and it wont run the drivers ill check belkins site for new drivers but if anybody has had this problem please let me know thanks
Patrick

Guru3 · 01-04-2004, 06:10 AM

The easiest way to find drivers for linux is to type something like "Belkin XXX Card Linux" into google and see what you get. Find out exactly what card you have and odds are there is indeed a driver, even if it is not built-in to RH9. But we really do need to know what card it is to help.

The Bad Penny · 01-04-2004, 07:09 AM

There are 2 chipsets in the belkin wifi card
there is the prism on f5d6020
and the atmel on f5d6020 ver 2 (somtimes called u)
the prism drivers are carried (I think) in the distro's the atmel ones dont seem to be.
you can find them and more info here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/atmelwlandriver/

Recently I was on the Blekin site & noticed that there was drivers for a ver 3 card (I hope you dont have this) as I cant offer you any info on that card

Hope this helps you

TBP

penguinpower77 · 01-04-2004, 09:15 AM

great i think i might have it it was a cheapo ($30 at comp show) thanks though
Patrick

penguinpower77 · 01-04-2004, 09:15 PM

the card is a f5d6001 and i found drivers but they are zipped and winzip wont unzip them it is the ADMtek chipset but i am not sure if drivers will help now that i think about it because when it says checking for new hardware at start up it dont detect it

The Bad Penny · 01-05-2004, 12:22 AM

They should unpack fine in linux, are you sure its zip and not gzip or similar as zip is for the windows platform.
Anyway it wont be found at new hardware detection bcause your pcmcia services havent started yet so there is nothing to find.
look a bit further down it will begin [Cardmgr] just before X kicks in.

Good luck

TBP

penguinpower77 · 01-05-2004, 01:51 AM

i guess it just didnt show in checking for new hardware like it did with my new mouse oh well and i dont see X i go strait to GNOME I'll look for what you are talkin about

beoch · 01-08-2004, 08:47 PM

It looks like I do have the version 3 card, it's a F5D6001au, and the only other version number that I can find is on the "Start Here" panflet - P74057au-C.

Has anyone had any luck in finding out the chipset used by version 3?

Thanks for any help,

Brian

penguinpower77 · 01-08-2004, 10:17 PM

do like guru3 told me to do type belkin XXX (fil in x with model number) drivers for linux something should come up

beoch · 01-08-2004, 11:19 PM

thanks for that but I've tried with no luck. The only drivers around are for the prism or admtek versions. I've mailed belkin to find out what chipset they are using, I'm going to hold my breath until they respond

Guru3 · 01-09-2004, 01:57 AM

You can look in the FCI database with the FCI ID and generally find internal pictures to find out the chipset. It's pretty reliable.

beoch · 01-11-2004, 05:58 AM

Cheers I found the FCC number, NDD9571260303 and looking at the FCC ID search on fcc.org I can see that the card is made by a Taiwanese company called Edimax who call it the EW-7126. You can see from this link that the card is also sold by a lot of other companies:

FCC cover letter

And you can see from Edimax's user manual that the card actually uses a Realtek 8180 chip. Yeah you can see that written on the largest chip on the card too :/

Here's a link to the
driver download

And here's a link to another discussion on this site for people having trouble with this Realtek chipset.

Thanks for the help

Brian

Corona · 03-14-2004, 08:22 AM

The Belkin F5D6001au can be used under linux!
As had been determined above, the card is the RTL8180L chipset, but I found the realtek drivers don't recognise it. This is because belkin have put their own vendor and device id's on the card, so the driver's don't see it as a realtek. The solution for this is to modify the drivers, telling them the id's of your card.
The relevant file is r8100_pci_init.c from the realtek drivers.
At line 58, you'll see this section of code with the original id's in it, 10ec and 8180. replace the id's with the one's in this snippet, 1799 and 6001 respectivly:

static struct pci_device_id rtl8180_pci_id_tbl[] = {
{ 0x1799, 0x6001 /*0x8139*/, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, 0, 0, 0 },
{0,},
};

Then compile and install as the instructions say. I found this thread to be good for setting up the driver: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...rtl8180+driver

I could then use the belkin wireless, after fixing up my firewall. It's been performing very well for me since. This method also allows the use of realtek drivers for this card under windows, and I presure it will work for mac os x as well.

Corona

beoch · 03-16-2004, 04:50 PM

Good work.

I vaguely remember replacing the device ids though, and still had no luck. There were several versions of the realtek driver, some of which I couldn't even get to compile.

Which version of the realtek drivers are you using, and which kernel?

I'll install fedora core one and give it a go.

Cheers

Brian

Corona · 03-16-2004, 06:45 PM

Yes, the versions are very important. The realtek drivers have a pre-compiled core, which as far as I can tell is kernel specific. I used the driver specified as the redhat 9 version, and I had to downgrade the kernel on my computer (currently on fedora) to 2.4.20-8 from redhat 9. I'm currently trying to recompile my kernel to see if it works with the standard 2.4.20 kernel. Trying to use the driver on the fedora kernel (2.4.22), it compiled fine, but gave segmentation faults when trying to insert the module.
I can also verify that this driver can be used to put the belkin card into ap mode, so your linux box can be used as a proper access point. I haven't fully explored how well it works, but I got a link fine.

Corona