I have the following setup running Mandrake Linux 9.1

AMD Athlon 850 MHz
80 gig hard drive, IDE/ATA
Siemens SpeedStream 1024 wireless NIC card, PCI (version 1)
DVD drive
CD-RW/CD-R drive
Sound Blaster Audigy MP3 PCI
NVidia GeForce 2 MX 200 with 32 MB of video ram - PCI
512 MB of RAM
HP PhoenixBios 6.0.J

This is an HP Pavilion 8770C but has been upgraded and modified by me. I
added the bigger hard drive, the video card, sound card, and more RAM, and
updated the BIOS to the latest version via HP's support site.

This machine runs almost flawlessly with Win98, WinME, Win2000, and WinXP.

I installed Mandrake Linux 9.1 this week. Everything works great, except my
wireless NIC card keeps losing the connection / timing out, going extremely
slow when it does work in short "bursts" then it just dies over and over. I
can successfully open pages sometimes using Mozilla or Konqueror, but they
load very slow and it often times out and seems to stop getting data over
the wireless connection. This wireless card works great with Windows but
seems to not work so well with the Orinoco driver that it is using under
Mandrake Linux 9.1 though. I would love for this to work with my card under
Mandrake 9.1 - any tips, fixes, ideas, work arounds, or anything else
helpful would be appreciated greatly. Thank you. Feel free to e-mail me or reply here, whichever (or both) works best. Thank you.

I got some more information from within Mandrake Linux 9.1 about the wireless card.

bus: PCI

bus ID: 1260:3873:111a:1024

Location on bus: 0:10:0

Harris Semiconductor / Prism 2.5 Wavelan Chipset

orinoco_pci

I hope this information helps. Thanks.

CptSiskoX,

I'vegot a very similar situation. I have the exact same wireless card and I have Mdk 9.1 installed on an HP pavilion notebook model xz168.
I am not experiencing disconnections, but I am experiencing very slow xfer... mostly not exceeding 96Kb/s.
After doing a few days of research I have found people saying we should try the linux-wlan-ng or hostap drivers. The one shipped with the kernel (orinoco) is the least revered of the three.

-Aaron

did you guys finally get it working ? I am having the same problem... and am very close to throwing this card in the thrash.,.. unfortunately it works perfectly with XP...

please feel free to email me

Sorry for extremely long time to reply. I went without Linux for most of the past year

I'm still a newbie basically though I've been using Linux a little bit on and off for the past few years... I'm an expert on Windows (sorry guys <g>). But I like Linux and it's come a loooooooooonnnnngggggggg way in the past few years. (Way to go Linux community!)

Anyway...

I never did really get the network card I was using working any better with Linux. However, I now have replaced it with a different card and given that card to a Windows only user who doesn't like Linux very much (they're 13, so don't be too hard on them).

So with the other network card, Mandrake 9.2 works fine. The new card is a Linksys 802.11b card. That's on my older desktop system (AMD Athlon 850 Thunderbird, 512 MB RAM, 128 MB GeForce FX 5200, SB Audigy PCI). On my new desktop (purchased in like November or October 2003) - I installed a D-Link 520 PCI 802.11b card which is here.

I have never tried Linux on my new machine yet (it has XP Home Edition on it, though I have the CD for Pro also <g>). Mandrake works just fine on the older computer though and I'm basically happy with it. I confess, I did try Lindows 4.5 and wasn't too put off by it, though it's a bit too user-friendly for me <g>. I couldn't get Lindows to network with my Windows XP box, even though Lindows did detect all my hardware successfully, including the NIC. (I ran Lindows Live 4.5 to test it). However, Mandrake 9.2 wouldn't connect to my router for a while, until I edited smb.conf or some file like that and added a bunch of stuff manually. (no prob, just needed to know what and how to do it at first). This is what tipped me off to add entries to the file. URL=http://madwifiwiki.thewebhost.de/wiki/Ath0OnMandrake92][/URL] http://madwifiwiki.thewebhost.de/wiki/Ath0OnMandrake92

I use WEP 64-bit because some of the NICs on my LAN do not support WPA. They all support WEP though (some only up to 64-bit not 128). I can see WinXP from Mandrake, and visa versa, but cannot access shares on Windows from Mandrake yet. Working on that. Any tips please feel free to share.