need wireless driver for Toshiba A25-S207
 

I've just installed Mandrake 10.0 recently, and now my problem is setting up the wireless card so I can have Internet access (I'm on Windows at the moment). I think the first thing I need to do is download a linux compatible driver for it, but I have no idea where to look. Toshiba claims to offer some linux support (check their site and search linux for the site) , but every time I go there it says I'm not allowed to access it. My computer info is below; any help would be appreciated.

Toshiba Satellite A25-S207
Windows XP Home / Mandrake Linux 10.0
wireless card driver (in Windows)- Agere Systems v. 7.62.0.390

I suppose that's about all that applies. Let me know if you need anything else.

We need to know what chipset the card uses before we can point you in a direction. If you run lspci in a console, you should be able to find that information. Feel free to post the output if you need help interpreting it.

Here's the output of lspci:

00:00.00 Host bridge: ALi Corporation: Unknown device 1672
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ALi Corporation PCI to AGP controller
00:04.0 IDE interface: ALi Corporation M5229 IDE (rev c4)
00:06.0 Mutimedia audio controller: ALi Corporation M5451 PCI AC-Link Controller Audio Device (rev 02)
00:07.0 ISA bridge: ALi Corporation M1533 PCI to ISA Bridge [Aladdin IV]
00:08.0 Bridge: ALi Corporation M7101 PMU
00:09.0 Modem: ALi Corporation Intel 537 [M5457 AC-Link Modem]
00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
00:0c.0 USB controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 43)
00:0c.1 USB controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 43)
00:0c.2 USB controller: NEC Corporation USB 2.0 (rev 04)
00:10.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1410 PC card Cardbus Controler (rev 01)
00:11.0 CardBus bridge: Toshiba America Info Systems ToPIC95 PCI to Cardbus Bridge with ZV support (rev 33)
00:12.0 System peripheral: Toshiba America Info Systems SD TypA Controller (rev 05)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Trident Microsystems CyberBlade XP Ail (rev 82)

If it helps at all, the wireless card is built-in, and not a separate USB thing or anything like that

EDIT: btw, I had to type this in by hand since I can't get Linux to access the Internet yet. Is there any way I could copy this sort of thing to my Windows partition, or put it on a CD? I tried a CD-RW, but the two computers I used to read both came up w/ "cyclic redundancy check" errors.

Sorry about the hand typing....To save the output of any console command to a text file, you can use a redirect (>) like this lspci > filename. You could copy it to a Windows partition if, and only if, it is FAT32. Linux can't write to NTFS partitions. You should be able to write it to a CD as well. I've had good luck using K3B for burning CD's and I haven't had problems with them being readable elsewhere.


Now for the bad news....I don't see a wireless card in that list. Unless I'm mistaken (which is always a possibility) the RealTek 8139 is a wired ethernet controller, not a wireless card. Is it possible you missed a line or the card wasn't active? If you have information on the make and model of the wireless card maybe we can go from there.

The properties from Windows device manager just say it's a Toshiba Wireless LAN Mini PCI card, and the location is on the Texas Instruments PCI-1410 PC card Cardbus Controler . This seems to be the same as line 00:10.0 from the lspci. Maybe that's something to go from?

I did a little googling on the card name and there may be some good news. According to this site , that card can run from the orinoco_cs module, which means this card could have native linux support.

The downside is that I have no experience with orinoco based card, so the advice I'm going to give is doing more than a bit of guessing.

The first thing I would do would be to look at the output of lsmod and see if the orinoco module is loaded. I would also look at the output of iwconfig and see if Mandrake has already recognized the card. If neither of those work, maybe try modprobe orinoco_cs and see if the module will load.

Also, have a look at the output of dmesg and see if there is anything about configuring ethernet cards. I'm going to guess that your Realtek will be eth0, so if you see anything about eth0 you should be in the right part of the dmesg output. Look for something like eth1 or wlan0.

I did a little bit of googling myself and found a thread with someone with the same computer and problem, although running Debian. I can't post the URL since I don't have 5 posts here yet, but google for toshiba a25 orinoco_cs linux, and it's the first couple of entries. Maybe you can sort through it a little more knowledgeably than I can, but I'll keep checking it out. As for lsmod and that, most of those said "command not found" when I tried them in the Mandrake console, even though they have descriptions when i try something like "man lsmod". I'll keep working on it; thanks for the help so far.

EDIT: I suppose I should say I typed those in thru Konsole in the KDE environment, if that makes a difference.

Whoa!
 

Okay, I just made a pretty huge discovery. After finding out I had to run those commands at the root level and knowing how to do that, I found Linux did seem to recognize my card in lsmod and dmesg. iwconfig still isn't recognized though. But anyway, after seeing that, I went into Configure my computer > Network and Internet > Manage connections and found that my wireless card does seem to be listed there as eth1 ! I guess I just had to look in the right place to find info on it. Here's everything it listed:
eth1: Intersil PRISM2 11Mbps Wireless Adapter
DHCP
No IP address
No Mask

DNS servers:
64.233.xxx.x
64.233.xxx.xx
192.168.xxx.x

Search Domain: wowway.com (this is my ISP. I guess it found that from our router or modem automatically, possibly? so maybe I have a connection somewhere...)

Options: start at boot, Track network ID car, and Network Hotplugging all unchecked

Vendor: Intersil PRISM2 11Mbps Wireless Adapter
Description: Intersil PRISM2 11Mbps Wireless Adapter
Media Class: -
Module name: orinoco_cs
Mac address: (lists some numbers; I'm not sure if it's a security risk to post these or not)
Bus: -
Location on the bus: -

Hopefully this should help, or at least narrow down the possibilities. I tried doing start at boot in options, but it didn't seem to work and after i rebooted and looked at the options again it was unchecked again. hmm...

AHA! I finally figured it all out. turns out I just had to go into the control center and set up a new connection for my wireless card and input some network data. I tried to do it before, but this time I knew what I needed to look for and where to find it. Thanks a bunch for the help hangdog, you really put me on the right path to figure this out. I'm currently in Konqueror right now so I know it's working. Thanks again!

Congrats! And thanks for posting the solution you found, it will help somebdoy else who has this card.