Hello everyone,

I have recently done a dual boot system (XP Home / RH9) on a Toshiba Satellite 2435-S255 Laptop. Red Hat appears to have loaded quite smoothly and will have to tweak the Ir support.
My main question is: Has anyone found out what chipset is used in the Belkin F5D6020 802.11b wireless PCMCIA card and if so, does it work with RH9?
I am very new to Linux and have not done anything above and beyond the basic install. (recompile kernal's...etc...)

Here's what I got. The chipset is a Broadcom BCM94306CB. I can't get it to work on RH9.0 on a Dell Inspiron. I got a suspicion that the card is actually an 11g thingy for which there are no drivers yet (though the box says it's an 11b card ...). If anyone else has experience with this me too I'd be interested in more info.

Tom

OK, forget previous reply - I was messing with another Belkin card. Here's what I had to do to get your card working. Good news is it does work under RH9 - bad news for a newbie is that it's a bit of work. I'll try and be complete here ;-)

The MAIN problem is that Belkin changes chip between version 1 and version 2 of the card an didn't really document that. The chip used in your card is the ATMEL chip.

1. You need to ensure you install your kernel sources. It's just a package; you'll find it in the RH packae manager. Install it c'se you're going to need those to compile your own driver. It's not installed by default. If you have updated your kernel using the RH update manager you will need to download updated kernel sources too before you continue.

When you're at it make sure you got hte pcmcia package installed too. If youi got a file /etc/init.d/pcmcia then the package is installed.

2. Go read http://lists.linux-wlan.com/pipermai...ch/009722.html

3. Go get the driver code at sourceforge as indicated in above article (http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net). Download version 2.1.1 -- I could not get 2.1.2.2 to work

4. You need to unstall bzip2 on your machine, otherwise you're not going to be able to unpack it. Check in your RH9 cds, in the RPM directories for the package and run a rpm -i on it to install it. If you get a nice click and point window when you insert a CD you can just doubleclick on the bzip2 rpm and that'll work just as well

5. unzip the driver code with bunzip2. Then do a tar -cvf on the result.

6. cd into the atmeldriver directory. There is a bug in the code. Documentation on how to fix it is on sourceforge on http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index...01&atid=489567
-- basically the code as is tries to install in a directory that does not exist. The sourceforge bug report tells you how to fix it.

7. configure, compile and install the driver as per instructions in the README

8. Add a line 'alias eth1 pcmf502rd' to your /etc/modules.conf. If you're lucky RH9 would automatically do that for you but I was not lucky. Add the lines to /etc/pcmcia/atmel.conf as per article on
linux-wlan.com:
card "Belkin F5D6020u (aka. F5D6020 ver.2) WLAN PC Card"
manfid 0x01bf, 0x3302
bind "pcmf502rd"

9. restart pcmcia ( /etc/init.d/pcmcia restart

10. open the RH network configuration screen. You should now see a device named eth1, identified as a wireless device. Configure it and you'r ego! If you don't see the device at this point give the machine a reboot so it re-reads modules.conf (though I would think that should not be necessary). Make sure you set channel and SSID of your wireless base correctly in the setup for eth1. You can check if all is up and running using
/sbin/ifup eth1
/sbin/ifconfig eth1

So there you go. I just did all of that over the last 2-3 hours and am now typing this in my confy bed, no cables attached! - works like a charm.

Good luck - check back in here if you get stuck.

Tom

OOPS! Tomto posted while I was typing.

If you do indeed have a plain ol' "F5D6020", without any letters at the end (i.e. F5D6020u, F5D6020n) then you have a Prism 2 chipset. I'm a Slackware user so I can't be sure what to do with RH9 to get it to work but, you should (keep in mind I'm a newbie also) have these modules loaded:

1) pcmcia_core
2) yenta_socket
3) ds
4) hermes
5) orinoco
6) orinoco_cs

If would assume RH9 would also have pcmcia services available, something like the command "service pcmcia start"? I think you also have an X program like "neat" to configure network devices right? Once again, I'm a newb so I hope this helps.

Mismacku is correct, too. If you got a revision 1 card then all should work right out of the box on RH9. However, if this card is a recent purchase (which I assume) then it will be an ATMEL-based card. If it is there will be a sticker on the box, saying 'Rev 2' (or something like Rev 2.x.y). In that case, follow the outline I just typed up.

Enjoy!

Tom

Thanks Guys!
That is a tremedous help... Upon pulling the card it is a ver.2 card. I will start on the instructions you provided over the next day or so and see how things fly!
Thanks again.

Great advice Tom. THe only problem I had was with step 9. "You should now see a device named eth1, identified as a wireless device" My card is showing up as an (inactive) ethernet device. I tried adding it as a wireless device but 'pcmf502rd' is not listed in the dropdown. I have a Sony FX150 with Redhat 9. Please advice.

In one of your posts, you mention using a BroadCom BCM94306CB chipset card. I'm trying to get my Belkin F5D7010 to work on RH9. Did you ever get your BroadCom chipset card working? Same card as this?

Thanks for any hints or advice...

I am also trying to get this card working on my laptop, it worked great with windows XP but I cant get Linux to recognize that it is even there even though it seems the PCMCIA support stuff is there at boot up, anybody have any info? Thanks

I've more or less got the Belkin F5D6020 with the atmel chip running on RedHat 9 using the
latest (0923 sourceforge snapshot. This snapshot unfortunately requires the wxGTK package
from wxwindows.org. I downloaded the source rpm and built the packages, just to make
sure I was compatible with RH9. Anyway, things seem to be working, but there's one annoying problem: When the card is in but there is no 802.11 signal present, I get an endless series
of messages on /var/log/messages, which would eventually fill up the disk. Anyone know
how to stop this?

When you build the atmel driver, make sure you answer no to "Build All?" and it will then ask you if you want to build with debug - say no to that, debug is what causes your logs to fill up.

That did the trick. It didn't occur to me to answer N to "build all?"

I did all this, and it worked. Then I logged out of my root account, and back into my regular user account. And now, the only way I can get my wireless connection working again is to restart my pcmcia service using:

"/etc/init.d/pcmcia restart"

Any idea why or how to fix this? Thanx.

-Chris

BUMP....

Sorry if bumping annoys you, but I know there are people who only look at the first page of posts.

-Chris

Ok....I switched distros...I'm running Mandrake 9.2 now. I've found it to be much cleaner, and it runs much faster on my old Inspiron than RH9. However, I still have the same problem. (After finally finagling my way to being able to compile the ATMEL driver...stupid Kernel Source not being included in MDK9.2....what the heck is wrong with those people??)

When I start up the computer, the PCMCIA card does not initialize properly. When I issue the command, "/etc/init.d/pcmcia restart", everything becomes perfect, and I can surf AND browse my network just fine! (Have some problems with GAIM, but I'll work on that later.)

My question? WHY do I have to restart the PCMCIA services just to get the silly thing working? Why won't it work on boot? It's set in DrakeConnect to start up on boot, but something isn't working right, so I'm lost. ANYONE? ANYONE? Bueller? Bueller?

Edit: more information

Today, when I got home from work, I checked everything I knew how to do.

First, I ran "ifup eth0" in case the network adapter was just not up. It told me, "dhcpd is running ifdown it before". Now, I'm not entirely sure what this means, but it seems like it's basically telling me, "It is up, you moron."

Then I ran ifconfig, to see what was up. This is the output I got here:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:30:BD0:54:CA
inet addr:192.168.1.102 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:9 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:9 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:1259 (1.2 Kb)
Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:50 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:50 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:3296 (3.2 Kb) TX bytes:3296 (3.2 Kb)

Nothing spectacular, in my opinion. Nothing it's telling me that I can see.

I also ran "lsmod" and wrote down everything that was running. I then restarted using the method I stated above. "/etc/init.d/pcmcia restart". I then ran all the commands again. Here is the AFTER output from ifconfig. It really looks the same to me except for the transmitted and received values, which tells me that the card is working after I restarted it:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:30:BD0:54:CA
inet addr:192.168.1.102 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:23 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:4 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:796 (796.0 b)
Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:92 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:92 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:6036 (5.8 Kb) TX bytes:6036 (5.8 Kb)

lsmod didn't tell me anything either. All the same modules are running before I restarted the card and after. So what's the deal? Should I be posting more info? Or is this enough to tell someone something? If I need to post more, please let me know, and I'll do it. I just need to know that this is what you need me to do. Thanx!

-Chris