I am trying to install a Lucent ORiNOCO Silver USB Wireless Lan Adapter (made by Agere Systems) onto Mandrake 9.1.

I am using the Linux drivers written by the manufacturer which can be found at: www . agere . com / support /drivers / (Sorry, it wouldn't let me post an URL.)

In the readme file, it says:
% tar xzvf ../wavelan2_cs-6.20.tar.gz

About the most I could figure out from this line was to rename the tarball from the original name on the CD, which was WLLI620.TGZ, and rename to WLLI620.tar.gz. It was not clear to me if I needed to unpack this to a directory in my /home/my_user_name directory or on root. (The files are currently unpacked in my /home/my_user_name directory.)

The next step in installing the drivers told me to do the following:

4) To build and install the driver, follow the
procedure below:
% make config

Answer the presented questions. Usually the default
answers are OK and pressing "Enter" is enough.
On RedHat 7.1 systems however, you should specify
"/usr/src/linux-2.4" as the Linux source directory
instead of the default "/usr/src/linux".

This is where I began to run into problems. After about 5 hours of reading man pages, HOWTO, web pages and my small linux book library, I am still lost. It keeps giving me the error msg of:

make: *** No rule to make target 'config'. Stop.

Inside the driver archive there is a file called wavelan2_cs.mk, and the first few lines read:

#
# Makefile for wavelan2_cs
#

I know the makefile is there somewhere, but I don't know which commands to use to bring it where I can use it. If I try to run ./Build or ./Install (2 shell scripts in the file), it tells me I need to run 'make config' first. The only thing that I can find in my favor is in the Mandrake Control Center under Hardware (using HardDrake). After a scan of the system it lists "ORiNOCO USB Client" under Unknown/Others. I am so lost!

If anyone can help me, you will have my eternal gratitude!

I use an Orinoco compatible card - and the drivers are built into 9.1... it discovered the card (with a little prompting) upon install of the O/S (as orinoco_cs) and works just fine.. Have you tried this?

Doug A

I tried to go through the reinstallation but it only found the built-in PCI network card, but nothing on the USB.

Is there some screen that I missed on there? I tried to install wireless tools, but I still don't see anywhere in the installation to add a USB device. Does this sound like 9.1 just doesn't like my wireless nic for some reason because it's not a standard pcmcia or pci?

(Sorry it took me so long to respond to this -- work has been very crazy lately! )

Hi again!

I didn't realise it was a USB card. USB is reasonably stable in mandrake 9.1 but support does seem to vary from machine to machine - I know my Sony Vaio FX310 is one of the machines that failed to work at all until 9.1 (9.0 backwards there were IRQ errors owing to a fault in the Sony bios rather than in mandrake) 9.1 incorporates a patch that overcame this - the patch was built into Win XP and silently overwrote the bios - the power of Microsft and the cosy relationship they have with sony! :-(

I've tried a linsys card on my usb and it's detected just fine. Do other USB devices work? Could you print out the appropriate logs and mail them to me at sethanon31a@yahoo.com and I'll take a look?

Good luck

Doug A

This morning when I got up, I thought to myself, "I think I'll work on the Linux box today..."

After a few more hours of frustration with the Lucent WLAN client, I gave up and pulled out my Compex WLU11A... Mandrake Control Center listed it as a D-Link DWL-120. So I did a search for that model in google and found a driver that works. In fact, I'm posting from my Linux box now!

I rebooted and the system showed the following lines:
../src/usb/vnetusba.c: usb eth0 initialized and registered
eth1: RealTek RTL8139 Fast Ethernet at 0xe093b000, 00:50:22:87:f5:3b, IRQ 10
eth1: Identified 8139 chip type 'RTL-8139C'
eth1: Setting 100mbps full-duplex based on auto-negotiated partner ability 45e1.
../src/usb/vnetusba.c: Device eth0 closed
eth1: Setting 100mbps full-duplex based on auto-negotiated partner ability 45e1.
eth1: Promiscuous mode enabled.
device eth1 entered promiscuous mode
device eth1 left promiscuous mode

After running the network config, I was able to bring my Apache back into the network and everything seems to be running a-OK! I had a few people at work look at the driver code for the WLAN and they said that it wasn't set up correctly to use a makefile.

I just thought that I would pass this along to anyone else with the same troubles. It also brings up the question: If most of the distros are utilizing the xwindows interface, why are the drivers still console only? It would be helpful to newbies who are just starting out on their pretty interface and the BOOM... immediately thrown into the world of make config and error 2's on make install... (i.e. It took me 20 mins to install mandrake and almost 2 weeks to get it online...)

At this point, I'm still up in the air whether or not this is just a hobby or a viable alternative to winblows for me...