Currently installed Mandrake 10.1 on my laptop, and trying to get my PCMCIA wireless card to work. I've been following a tutorial for the install, but haven't had the best luck so far.

My wireless card is the Linksys WPC54G, as listed in the Linux HCL at this site. I've followed the tutorial precisely, and here's where i'm stuck.

The drivers loaded for it are called "lsbcmnds", and I am pretty sure they are the correct ones. The problem I have run into is no matter what I do, iwconfig will not list wlan0.

It will list:
lo
eth0
sit0

But not wlan0. I've done a little searching and tried a few things i found but it is still not listed, and the card does not appear to be getting power as none of the LED's are lighting.

Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT: And it seems like everytime i try to set it up, it disables my ethernet connection to the internet.

Still not able to get it running. And I've found that I have to completely reconfigure my ethernet connection every time i try to set up the wireless connection.

Do you know what version of the card it is? v1, v2 ...?

How are you setting it up? Are you using the gui tools, or command-line tools, or ndiswrapper?

Ndiswrapper. I'm wondering if it's tryin to set as eth0... since it keeps interefering with it when i try to set it up.

I can't say I have an answer, never having had to do that in Mandrake, but I do know that if your card explicitly says that it is version 2 (ie: " WPC54G ver. 2 " ), then you need to use the LSTINDS.INF windows driver instead of lsbcmnds.inf.

Also, depending on the age of your laptop, some of the old ones are incompatible with cardbus PCMCIA cards. Though I doubt that would be your problem.

Ah yes. I just physically checked the card, it is version 2. I'll switch out the driver. Also, when i check the PCMCIA configurer, it says that no Controller is detected. Could that have an effect, or is it simeply because of the wrong driver?

EDIT: Actually... where in the world do i find this file?

If the controller isn't detected, that could definitely have something to do with it.
Time for someone with more experience in the area than I to step in.

Assuming that you got lsbcmnds.inf off of the cd that comes with the card, LSTINDS.INF should be in the same directory on the cdrom as lsbcmnds.inf.

You might let folks know what laptop you have and list what info you have (know how to get) on the PCMCIA controller (chipset, etc...).

Also, you could also try http://mandrakeusers.org/, they might have more information on mandrake support for that laptop.

Well it's a Compaq Presario 900US, haven't really changed it from factory settings other than this of course. This card worked when i had windows loaded on it though...

Harddrake is showing a PCI1410 PC card Cardbus Controller. I believe this would be it?

Lots of info about Linux on that laptop with a little googling.

Some small stuff I found after a quick search:
In this mail archive there is lots of useful stuff, notably:
This with regard to mandrake 10 (which looks possibly like a problem similar to yours).
and:
This, which looks like something you might need to solve the problem.

You might look around and see what you can find. It looks like with mandrake (though I didn't find anything on 10.1) PCMCIA support may not be initially set up.

OK, I feel like a bloody idiot. I just installed the PCMCIA Daemon . Now the card is showing up under network devices, but it still isn't getting power or showing wlan0 to my iwconfig check.

EDIT: If i try to run the config tool, it lists a bunch of drivers that aren't right for this. Should i plug in a dummy one?

EDIT2: And no, wlan0 still says "No such device" when i run iwconfig

I have tried running back through some of the setup steps... but it's still not showing up.

I am still wondering wether or not I should run the "Run config tool" for it. The only issue is that the drivers I have are not showing up on the manual driver list. Is there a place I can add the driver so that it will appear on the list? Or could I just load up a dummy driver and override it with ndiswrapper?

The config tool is separate (as far as I know) from ndiswrapper. When you run the config tool it has access to all of the linux native drivers, but does not have access to the windows driver you were trying to use with ndiswrapper.

If the config tool does not present you with a driver to use with the card, then it likely doesn't have a driver native to the kernel that will work with the card -- don't bother with plugging in a dummy driver.

With ndiswrapper do this...

Insert the windows .inf driver file:
Check to see if it recognizes the card:
If the card is not recognized by ndiswrapper with the proper driver, then you likely have something else wrong with your system.

"lstinds driver present, hardware present"

i'm pretty sure that the drivers are not the problem at this point. It's simply not creating wlan0

Good, good.

What all have you done with ndiswrapper beyond that?
I'm assuming that you have run: ??

Yes, I have run ndiswrapper -m, and modprobe ndiswrapper. Nothing happens however, there is still no power going to the card from what i can see, and wlan0 still does not appear.