'oy!

i just installed redhat 7.2 on my home machine. at home, i connect to the net using a belkin usb wireless adapter (we have a wireless network connecting to our cable modem). i feel like i read somewhere that this particular adapter and usb wireless adapters in general are rather hopeless with linux. is this the case, or is there any way at all to get it up and running? i've been unable to thus far and have been left scratching my head quite a bit .

any ideas? much, much appreciated.

Post back with a little more information about the exact model of the USB adapter. I might be able to find something. Not too many driver maintainers have gone out of their way to produce the extra code for a USB device in the world of wireless, but if it uses the prism2 chipset, there's a shot.

Cheers,

Finegan

hey! thanks for the quick response. here's a link to the product's page on belkin's web site:

http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProdu...sNetworking%2F

...hope that actually brings it up. regardless, how can i tell if it's based on the prism2 chipset? about all i know about it is that it's 802.11b. any ideas? thanks -very- much for your help.

Linux and wireless support hasn't nearly gotten to the plug and play stage that it has with say, regular old ethernet.

I've never dealt with Belkin gear before, but from poking around their site I can't find any reason I would want to. I just downloaded the source for the linux-wlan-ng project, which is the only one I know of that covers USB devices at all, and the name "Belkin" never appears in any of the source code.

This of course doesn't mean anything as any given vendon is usually just repackaging something someone else made.

No matter what, this is going to mean a lot of compiling. If its realtively easy to get a different wireless adapter, I can suggest quite a few. If not, I can suggest what you could try to do to get this thing to work.

Cheers,

Finegan

thanks again for the response. depending on the price of getting another adapter (i got this one for free...long story), if you think that'd be easier/more efficient i'd do that i s'pose. what are your recommendations?

Anything Lucent, who is probably the best Linux supported wireless vendor. All of the kit is called Orinoco now, they spun off the division. Anything Prism2 (not 2.5 or 3): Dlink, Linksys (insert eye roll)... the Symbol cards: Symbol, 3Com. All of these have pcmcia to PCI adapters of some sort, some have straight pci cards. In almost every case you're going to have to end up compiling the drivers when you're done. I've done it for nearly all of the wireless projects out there on RH7.2 and Slackware 8.0, and there are no kludgy tricks or workarounds... they all work fine against stock kernels.

The only USB adapter that I know works for certain is the Linksys 2.5 with the drivers from www.linux-wlan.net which are a little complicated to get running, but the READMEs are fine. I helped a guy install that and get it running on RH7.2

WEP, the encryption, hardly works with any of the drivers, the exception being the Lucent/orinoco cards where it works brilliantly. However, anyone that wants on your LAN and has brain 1 in their noggin' can crack WEP.

If you search through the archives here you'll see a lot of varying success with different cards/brands. For instance I think the cheapest fix might be the ~$100 Linksys Prism 2.5 PCI card, which should work with both the orinoco drivers and the linux-wlan drivers, the former being the easiest of the two, but I don't have the gear to test it with...

Either way, Luck,

Finegan

hey again...thanks for all the help. i just determined that the wireless usb adapter i have by belkin -does- have the prism2 chipset. does this mean it would work with the drivers at linux-wlan? if so...any suggestions on installing? i have RH 7.2, just installed it the other day.

Yeah, sure its worth a shot before buying anything. First off, there is a bunch of source versions and one RPM version. I've never heard much good about the RPM version, and its 4 minors behind anyway. First, make sure you have a compiler and kernel source and kernel headers on your machine:

cd /usr/src
ls

and hope there is a directory there called linux, or I think RedHat calls it Linux-2.4.

To check on the compiler:

gcc -v

If that isn't there, you're going to need to grab the CDs and install the RPM for gcc, which has one dependency, cc-something (its a pre-compiler), then the linux-2.4.7-10 kernel source and there's another one for headers... it should be rather easy to find even with the coolio package manager gui tools that RH has.

ftp://ftp.linux-wlan.org/pub/linux-wlan-ng/

has the drivers. I would get .13 as the 14s are pre-releases. Copy it anywhere (/usr/src/ is a customary place, but most of my source is in /home/bob, and unpack it with:

tar xvzf packagename.tar.gz

Then:

cd packagesnewdirectory


READ THE README and INSTALL files. When you finally run ./Configure, make sure to say no to _cs, _pci, and _plx as it will whimper about wanting pcmcia source. You only need to build for usb.

Luck,

Finegan

hey...i went through the install et al, but when i finally finished and started with the final set of commands, i hit a snag. the first command ('modprobe prism2_usb prism2_doreset=1'), the response i get is an error saying it can't find module prism2_usb. any idea? i'm thinking i did something wrong somewhere in the installation of the driver but...i've no idea where. it seemed rather simple.

After the "make all" you did do a "make install" ?

And during the compile, it actually finished right? It didn't end with an [error 1] or [error 2]?

If all of that got done, just to make sure the thing made it to where its supposed to be, run:

updatedb (this will take a long time)
locate prism2_usb.o

And hope there's one in /lib/modules/2.4.7-10/somewhere/somewhere_else/blah/blah/blah. If not, but there is one in where ever you untar'ed the directory, then you just forgot to run a make install.

Cheers,

Finegan

hey again. okay. one step forward and then i get messed up again . here's what happened. i figured out what was happening with linux being unable to find the prism2_usb module. for some reason the default install directory in wlan's setup was set to linux-2.4.7custom, as opposed to just linux-2.4.7. the custom directory didn't even exist prior to the install, it seems. so i deleted the custom directory, redid the install pointing it at the linux-2.4.7 directory, and reran the modprobe. this time, i didn't get an error. i didn't get any response at all, in fact (after running 'modprobe prism2_usb prism2_doreset=1'), which i'm assuming is normal. however, the very next command (calling for wlanng etc.) returned an error, saying linux couldn't find wlanng. any ideas for this one? is it normal that the modprobe didn't return any response, just went to another command prompt?

have to say...this is taking awhile, but i very much appreciate your help and it's thus far been very good for familiarizing myself a bit w/ linux.

Familiarizing, dude your getting a crash course. First off, yes the modprobe returning nothing means it inserted right. No output at all usually means whatever command you gave it was accepted. When you insert a module, it technically becomes part of the running kernel. Hmmm... where next?

This is where I start to faulter a bit as I have never, not once, had to bother with USB anything on a linux box. However, who cares what the plug looks like, here's the commands to see what's going on:

dmesg (This will show the kernel detecting hardware as it detected it, so hopefully when you modprobed the module it will register with the kernel. It is possible to have a loaded module that isn't bound to anything, just sitting there like a dead cat, which makes sense in the case of hotpluggable devices like USB. Usually in the case of a PCI card like a NIC or a sound card if the module doesn't find hardware to bind to, it kicks with errors.

lsmod (This will list the currently inserted modules and whether they're being used.)

ifconfig (This takes a number of arguments [an argument is anything you enter after the command] Usually the form is something like:

ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.1 up

which would configure the first ethernet device [0 is always first], to have the address 192.168.0.1, and the device would be brought up. ifconfig by itself will show the current running devices [lo is a BS device so the machine can talk to itself] ifconfig -a would show all current devices up or down that are available. Your device, hopefully, should be wlan0, or maybe its wvlan0, its in the README [This wlan0 goop is against convention, which is one of the many aspects of the linux-wlan groups work that irks me. That, and there is a brilliant API for wireless devices that allows you to use a bunch of simple commands that they... well, have ignored while every other wireless driver group uses.].)

The thing to do now is to make sure that the kernel sees and binds that silly USB module to the device. The error from wlan-ctl might help, you could post it back.

Cheers,

Finegan

hey again...sorry it took so long for me to respond this time. okay. the exact command i'm up to in the install procedure is:

wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=enable

to which i get as a response:

wlanctl-ng: no such device

so!

i tried out the commands you gave me...it -appears- the driver is loaded...not sure if it's actually binding or not. regardless, here's the relevant info i got back from each command:

relevant output from DMESG:
init_module: prism2_usb.o: 0.1.13 Loaded
init_module: dev_info is: prism2_usb
usb.c: registered new driver prism2_usb

relevant output from lsmod:
prism2_usb size: 54816 used by 0 (unused)
p80211 size: 11360 used by 0 [prism2_usb]

whole output from ifconfig:
Link encap: Local Loopback
inet addr: 127.0.0.1 Mask: 255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU: 16436 Metric: 1
RX packets: 170 errors:0 dropped: 0 etc. etc.
TX packets: (The same)
collisions: 0 txqueuelen: 0
RX bytes: 11056 (10.7 Kb) TX bytes: 11056 (10.7 kb)

does this give you any ideas? the thing that makes me think it might be loaded in memory (the driver) but not bound to a device is the output from lsmod, that it's used by 0 (unused). am i right in thinking this?

thanks again!!

Okay, well the wlan-ctl utility isn't finding the device because the kernel hasn't registered it. This could either be:

A) funky USB stuff, that I don't know much about.

or,

B) What we kinda expected, that the linux-wlan group simple doesn't support the Belkin version of this chipset.

I'de recommend a little poking around the RH site through their Q+A section about USB devices. Offhand, do you have any others in and working? Mouse, keyboard? Then at least uhci and core are doing their jobs...

Also, if you're in the "buying a new toy" route, I found that the newest orinoco and prism2 drivers are beginning to cover a TON of new devices, so nearly anything in PCI land you pick up should be able to work.

Luck,

Finegan