Issues with Cisco Aironet 350 PCMCIA wireless card
 

I have a VPR Matrix 220a laptop with a Cisco Aironet 350 PCMCIA card installed. I am running Ubuntu Edgy Eft.

I have been unable to get this card working properly under Linux and have no idea why, as apparently (in fact according to this sites HCL) this card works perfectly with Linux straight out of the box. The card itself is fine as it works under Windows XP.

Linux detects the card, it shows up using 'ifconfig' and 'iwconfig' as eth1 (although I have another interface called 'wifi0' - anyone know what this is?). Airsnort or Wireshark detect nothing through the eth1 interface. Kismet is unable to enter 'Monitor' mode, and detects either no APs or very few compared to the number that I know to exist.

DHCP requests to an unencrypted AP fail every time, so I cannot access the internet although the request appears to be getting sent out. The 'airo' and 'airo_cs' modules are correctly loaded in the kernel. I have tried downgrading the firmware to a 4.25.x version as I read that higher firmware versions are incompatible with Linux, but still no luck. I am using a 2.6 kernel which I believe contains the necessary drivers already.

I have tested with other LiveCD distributions (BackTrack, Knoppix) and get the same result. I did have this card working once under a Debian Sarge installation.

Can anyone shed any light here? Do you need any more info?

I had a 350 working on Dapper o.k. Seem to recall I had to screw around with the init scripts because the PCMCIA services weren't starting early enough.

Did notice during the late Edgy development there was a concern that a driver needed to be blacklisted in order to get this card working. Might have been an orinco driver. Maybe check the Ubuntu forums or wiki.
Don't know about the public release - I haven't gone Edgy yet, and my 350 has been tossed anyway.

I've scoured forums for a solution to this problem, but everything seems to be so vague. It seems that either the card works straight out of the box, or it's impossible to get working.

Does anyone have ANY ideas?

It might be an issue with WPA: check in your dmesg.
Mine shows: airo(eth0): WPA unsupported (only firmware versions 5.30.17 and greater support WPA. Detected 4.25.23)

So the card is detected and runs properly, the network manager shows the available networks and signal strength, but I can't get an IP address from the DHCP server (university network).

I tried to find firmware version 5.30.17 but I failed.