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PCMCIA configuring / Wireless Cards
I have RedHat 9 running on a toshiba laptop. I have a buffalo airstation g54 802.11b/g wireless pcmcia card. I am obviously still new with linux and am not even sure if this kernal will auto-detect my card..
Basically, my question is, will this wireless card work under RedHat 9? |
I don't know FOR SURE about this specific card...but from what I can tell in my readings in the last week there is very little (ie: None) support for cards that have the 801.11G specification.
This is due mostly because the makers of the chipset (Broadcomm I think) have refused to make linux drivers and have refused to release specifications so someone else can make them...so any effort currently underway is done by reverse-engineering. I just did a quick google search (*poke* google answers many questions quickly) and didn't find a single linux link to your card so I'm guessing that for now, there isn't much support. |
With that being said.. Would you or anyone else have a suggestion to a "well" supported wireless card? Or is there a way I could play with setting somewhere to attempt to get it to work?
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I can vouch for the netgear MA401.
I just bought 2 (one for my laptop and one for my SO's laptop) and they work AWESOME (so far), the set up for them in Mandrake was extremely painless. As for your card, its not a setting you can play with, someone needs to write a driver for the thing...if you CAN do that...I will heartily cheer you on as you do so because we need 802.11G support in linux. |
Yeah.. I guess what I meant was.. I don't neccassarily care if I get 'G' support.. 'B' would be fine.. So can I rig it to work with 'B'? Or this is going to be impossible as well? Because there is no driver for this chipset period..
Does the card you suggest have an external antenna jack? |
Its going to be impossible as well..sorry :(
And unfortunately no, the netgear doesn't have an antenna jack (I was disappointed in this as well....but for me it wasn't that important...) I heard that you can still install an antenna, but that means cracking open the housing and personally I'm not willing to do that :) |
I had read in an article somewhere that there was a 3rd party driver set.. Has anyone heard of such a thing?
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Well so far ALL the wireless card drivers are 3rd party :D
However, if there's one for the G variant, I haven't seen it in my net research (ie: googling) when I was trying to figure out which card to get. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist tho... As I was typing the above, I got curious...a little googling around gave me this: http://sourceforge.net/projects/madwifi/ Go take a look, I don't know how mature or functional this project is...but what have you got to lose? And make sure to post and let us know how you make out |
First, maybe your card is the atheros chipset, if so, look here: http://www.atheros.com/news/linux.html it's the only b/g chipset I've read that is supported in linux. EDIT: of course, the preceding link takes you ultimately to madwifi, so let me just say "oops", heh.
Second, tcaptain, I have one of those netgear ma401's coming in the mail, what module does it use? Does it support ap mode? |
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Also, patching the orinoco drivers to allow monitoring (aka airsnort, kismet and the like) was really easy (once I read the docs) I gotta say, I've had it a week now and I'm really happy with the card. |
the ap mode I'm talking about refers to what I've read about some cards being able to be used as an access point, I think they are the prism based cards, but I don't remember now. Anyway, thanx for the info, I'm looking forward to the receiving the card, it will be the first wireless card I own that uses orinoco, after the other 5, plug-n-play will be nice ;).
ps: now watch, my luck will be that, unbeknownst to anyone, netgear has changed the chipset in the ma401 to a broadcom...:D |
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I don't know if this card does AP...since for myself I never intended to use my laptop as an access point I never looked into it. However, its now 2 weeks of extensive use and I'm still VERY pleased with it...so I hope you will be too. |
I never intended to make my laptop an access point either, but I *do* have an old 486 compaq notebook that's got slack 9 on it and so suddenly I *need* to make a bridge out of it... ;)
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tcaptian - did you have any problems getting the 401 to work - I am trying to get it to run on my Dell (RH9.0) and not having much luck - as seen in this thread.
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Is your 401 still loading up ok as wlan0? Why is your prismII module loading? (I only have orinoco_ps that I noticed) Did you edit the following file: /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 with the appropriate values? I don't have any experience with RH9 tho, so the above might not help you. Here's what I had done: 1 - first day while setting up I made sure my AP is broadcasting my SSID and there's NO encryption involved, no filtering of any kind (ie: wide-open network). 2 - Then in Mandrake, I made sure that my kernel was compiled with the wireless options needed (I had done this a few days previously...but this seems to be the step people forget). 3 - Then I popped out my PCMCIA 3com NIC and popped in the MA401...at which point I was VERY pleasantly surprised to see it recognized immediately and the orinoco_ps module loaded. (NOTE: My MA401 was loaded at ETH0 and NOT as wlan0...I don't know why and I haven't poked around to change it, adopting a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude for now) At this point, things worked fine....BUT....now I needed to tighten things up... 4 - On the AP, I turned on MAC filtering, and 128 bit encryption and picked a long key. I also turned off SSID broadcasting. 5 - Editted the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and added settings like the SSID and key of my network. Did a /etc/init.d/network restart and boom, I was wireless and up and running again. |
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