SuSE 8.2 and Belkin 54g PCMCIA?

hlmiller · 08-02-2003, 12:53 PM

I'm trying to get Belkin's 54g PC card configured on SuSE 8.2 with no luck. In fact, I totally blew up Linux and had to reinstall becuase of it.

I'm kind of a newbie to Linux and a complete newbie to LinuxQuestions -- forgive me if I step on something. I tried a post earlier, but it apparently failed so if you see this twice, you'll know what happened.

Anyhow, I've seen some stuff on the web saying that this PC card is not yet supported, but also have seen some people getting it to work fine on distros *other than* SuSE. Obviously, manual steps are involved but I have no clue as to what they are. Is it really a requirement that I compile Atmel chipset drivers? I tried that too, but the instructions were lacking some detail.

Has anyone tried it? Can someone point me to a post that steps thorugh the process? I really want to disconnect from the cable!

Vitals are:
Dell Latitude CP notebook
SuSE 8.2 Pro -- no Microsoft whatsoever on this machine
Belkin 54g (model # F5D7010) PCMCIA NIC
3Com "Cyclone" PCMCIA NIC -- my wired connection to Internet

rioch · 09-23-2003, 07:22 PM

I have the same PCMCIA card and SuSe 8.2 and have had no luck as well. From what Ican tell, Linux has detected the card pretty well and lets me configure it but I'm not sure if it is turning it on. At the moment I'm unsure if this is a driver issue or just my ignorance in not knowing what settings are wrong.

Have you had any luck getting it working?

rioch · 09-24-2003, 07:06 AM

Ok more news. I have rummiged around my Linux box and discovered some weirdness. Maybe it's because I don't know what I'm doing, maybe it's worth noting. In Yast my card is being detected as a Belkin Network Card and is installed as eth0-pcmcia. Now that all sounds good, however there is no kernel module (driver) loaded for it - not good! I've emailed belkin for some "support" though I'm expecting a nice "Linux? Drivers? Huh?" in response! Lol! If you have found it working on other systems, do you have web pages I could go to to take a look? You could email them and ask them what kernel modules are loaded too. Hope you're still around to reply :O)

moosedaddy · 09-24-2003, 09:13 AM

As far as I know there are no working drivers for the 54g cards in Linux. I my be wrong, but at a month ago there was no drivers.

hlmiller · 09-24-2003, 11:10 PM

SuSE has something that if you start SuSE help and perform a search on "wlan", an article will be listed by the title of "Wireless LANs with SuSE Linux". There's a subheading in that article titled "Troubleshooting" which gave some insight about installing and configuring Orinoco drivers, but nothing helped me.

Even Belkin has a support link regarding the 54g card:

http://web.belkin.com/support/kb/kb.asp?a=1512

These guys say it was tested with Red Hat 7.1 & 73 as well as Mandrake 8.1. It goes through the steps of compiling the orinoco drivers.

In every case, all the help I've read tells me to go edit files that I know YaST handles already (or does it? Hmmm...) so it's really difficult to tell what manual intervention I need to do.

I tried compiling the ATMEL drivers and killed the SuSE OS. I don't trust those scripts anymore. :-)

I'm beginning to think the problem is in YaST anyway. After doing some searching in:

/lib/modules/2.4.20-4GB/kernel/drivers/net/wireless

I found the orinoco_cs.o file I need. I didn't put it there, so I assume YaST is able to find it because SuSE had to install it there! Is there another directory this file belongs (or make a link to it)? YaST creates the illusion that it's configured, but I cannot get an ETH1 to show up anywhere.

That's all I know -- maybe if we can get more people talking about it, I can get a bright idea to try...

rioch · 09-30-2003, 07:27 PM

Sorry I haven't put up a post recently, been busy with Freshers' Week at Uni :O)

That is a lot of gr8 info you've found, I haven't had time to try it - yet! I will try and give it ago sometime this week for myself, and see if I can get lucky, like I did at Freshers' Week! ;O)

I'm gonna give the ATMEL drivers ago. Who knows why it crashed your SuSe but hopefully mine will survive and provide us with some insight to this mess.

As for getting more people interested in this topic, we'll have to wait until more people start playing with Linux and 54g.

As for the method they suggest, it seems like you know far more than me on that topic. I have much to learn :O(

hlmiller · 09-30-2003, 10:18 PM

Well, the more I think about it -- the more I think I caused the crash, but I wish I knew what I did!

I've actually been toying with an SMC2632 wireless card and having the same amount of luck as the Belkin 54g. It's interesting to note that this card is listed as a supported card under SuSE 8.2:

/usr/share/doc/packages/pcmcia/SUPPORTED.CARDS

It also uses the orinoco driver, as listed in the above file. So now I have two expensive paperweights. Rats.

rioch · 10-01-2003, 01:08 PM

Still haven't tried to install the drivers but I (finally) received a reply from Belkin. In simple terms there are no drivers for Linux for the 54g Belkin card (like we didn't know that already). Thankfully they said this:

"...we can give you the information about the chipsets that is used in the card.You can try searching the drivers for the card.The chipset is F5D7010 Broadcom bcm9402 chipset...."

I was under the impression it was ATMEL. Is this right? Anyhow here's a new angle we can try! Good luck :O)

hlmiller · 10-02-2003, 09:14 PM

Unless Belkin doesn't know or care, *they* are saying the Atmel Wlan drivers are broadcom-based. I'm not all that sure anymore -- it's all confusing.

The web site:

http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net

has the download for Atmel source code, but again I never got it to work. According to Belkin's web page I referenced in an earlier post, all you need is the orinoco_cs driver, which already installed for me. You ought to list the files in the directory:

/lib/modules/2.4.20-4GB/kernel/drivers/net/wireless

to see if it's not already there. If you have it already, why compile another? The problem I'm having is getting SuSE to access the driver and use it. if I understand it correctly, this is a kernel driver and I have verified that I'm using kernel drivers (vs. external).

rioch · 10-04-2003, 05:34 AM

You were right about the orrinico drivers already being in use, and as for the ATMEL - well I couldn't even get off theground on that one - those cryptic questions in the installer held me back! LOL! I don't know the root of my network device :O(

I think that for now we are stuck. I totally agree that we should raise more awareness of this problem so someone smart can come along and create drivers for us :O)

dbtlightning · 10-20-2003, 04:24 AM

hi,

read sumthing on http://www.linuxant.com/drivers_bcmwl/
mayb that will help.

tim

rioch · 10-20-2003, 07:47 AM

It works!

Well done dbtlightning, the Linuxant drivers worked!

It's not perfect, since I haven't been able to access the Internet yet, however the drivers once setup, turn on my card and allow me to access my router configuration page, meaning something is going well. I guess now I just have to play around with the settings a bit.

The only real downside is that it's only a 30 day trial, and at current it doesnt seem as though u can buy the drivers to use. Shame really, would be nice ;O) Hopefully they will become available real soon, and hopefully they will be free :O) but I doubt that :O(

rioch · 10-21-2003, 12:26 PM

Well can u really believe it? It's working like I never thought it would!

Yup I am writing this post, on SuSe via my Belkin 54g PCMCIA Network card. The problem was is Yast. I simply removed the devices it had detected in the first place, and then allowed it to redetect them. This allowed it to select the new Linuxent drivers for the card and what-do-ya-know, its all working!

Hope hlmiller is still reading this thread!

hlmiller · 10-21-2003, 09:44 PM

Yep -- I'm still here. I've loaded the Linuxant driver loader, followed those instructions, etc. However I don't think I've tried your solution -- otherwise I'd be working by now. Rats.

I was pleasantly surprised to see ETH1 contain the 54g info I've been looking for all this time.

I'm guessing that by the end of 30 days, they'll contact us about getting a real license since I had to give away all that information... :-) It might be worth it, we'll see.

I'm going to disappear for a while again to see if that doesn't fix it...

Wish me luck! ;-)

hlmiller · 10-31-2003, 03:39 PM

I'm simply amazed you got working so easily...

I'm still having a lot of problems actually connecting to my AP. My laptop seems to recognize the PC card now (assigns it ETH1, etc.), but I still cannot connect to the network with it. As best I can tell, the darned thing is fully configured -- assuming the diagnostics are reporting correctly.

KwifiManager (version 1.0.1?) indicates no connection is possible (no network, no nothing). Is there a better GUI manager than this?

This is certainly far better than where I was before, but still no connection. What am I missing here?

Do you have WEP settings turned on at your AP? Without giving away your password(s) could you describe how your wireless is set up?

I've got Cable Modem -> Router -> WAP setup here. Passwords are required to login to the WAP (I've even verified this works with a WindowsNT laptop, using the same Belkin 54g card inserted). All computer network setups use DHCP to connect to the internet.

Some things I noticed with Linuxant driverloader:
1) I lose 54g card settings whenever I plug the card in. Little things like network and ESSID are lost. I have to re-run iwconfig to get them back in. I realize I can set up a script, but that's just wrong -- even the Windows box configures once and remembers the settings. Is there a way I can do this? What's the config file Linuxant looks for?

2) YaST still messes up the configuration somehow. I removed the device and let it re-detect. I entered all WAP connection data in YaST. I just don't think YaST is writing configuration data where Linuxant picks it up.

3) If I forget to unload the Linuxant drivers before shutting down, the shutdown process hangs. Not a clue why this would happen.

4) The iwconfig utility won't let me set the channel and some other options -- could this indicate something else I have yet to discover wrong about my configs?

So here I am, still hard-wired to a cable and slowly losing my hair from pulling it out. Sigh.