Belkin USB F5D6050 802.11b and Simply MEPIS

deepgrewal · 03-27-2005, 12:38 PM

Hello,

Recently I tried Simply MEPIS on my laptop and it works great. However, there is one problem. It picks up the fact that I have a Belkin USB F5D6050 802.11b adapter but I cannot get the adapter to work. This same adapter worked fine using SuSe 9.2 Professional. Unfortunately this adapter does not come with any .inf files. The only driver is a .sys file in Windoze. I attempted to use ndiswrapper on the .sys file and was not successful. Any suggestions?

spurious · 03-27-2005, 12:45 PM

I googled your device and picked this thread out: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-5164.html. That post has two links for linux Atmel drivers:

at76c503a - linux driver for Atmel AT76C503/505A based USB WLAN adapters (http://at76c503a.berlios.de/)
Atmel AT76C5XXx Wireless LAN Driver (http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net/news.html)

Unfortunately, it seems that there is very poor vendor linux support for this chipset; some vendors choose to write only to specific distros like Red Hat or Suse, and leave the others out. This may explain why your device works in Suse but not in Mepis (a Debian variant).

deepgrewal · 03-28-2005, 10:40 PM

Okay, so my kernel version is 2.6.7 and I had to download a special CVS version of the driver. In the README file for this version of the driver the following instructions are given:

Installation
-----------

make
make install

(with kernel 2.6 you must be run for both steps).

Now what does that last line mean "with kernel 2.6 you must be run for both steps"? I try to perform a make and make install and get an error message even though a Makefile exists in the directory. Any suggestions?