Hi,
Morning I was trying the prism driver. I had orinoco loaded at that time. So when I tried modprobe hostap_pci it failed. But I removed the other drivers I could load the prism driver. Does this show that orinico actually got the IO base and locked and prisam driver also detected the same? Or were they trying to lock the same default base and thus failed?. Discovery! I just did cat /proc/interrupts and saw interrupt 5 is shared by usb-uhci and wlan0!. I think I am getting something. Sorry for this post. I need to be little more patient.
--Sarin

I just whacked the wrong key and lost a paragraph and a half of a post... when I do this I get frustrated and usually leave out something important. So this is a pre-apology

Orinoco module: was almost definately working! iwconfig DOES NOT show any wireless extensions until AFTER you give it an IP address and bring the card up. Try:

ifconfig ethX 192.168.23.23 up
iwconfig

Now, as for the prism driver, which is a really fun toy, but can be a headache. Always remember to bring the card down with an:

ifconfig wlan0 down

before shutting down the machine, or there may be a kernel panic before the disk gets un-mounted, then you have to sit through a file system check... no fun. The driver does some incredible things, but it is definately very beta.

Having to rmmod the orinoco before modprobing the hostap_pci module is normal, only one can bind to the card at a time... everything is fine. With the hostap_pci module try those above two lines just with wlan0 in there instead of ethX. Oh, the X is whatever device number that is by the way, I'm guessing eth1... maybe... depends on how many other cards you have in there. The command:

dmesg

Will be able to tell you if everything is binding right. hostap_pci is going to send a lot of information to dmesg though, its pre-built for verbose debugging.

Offhand, I think you have both of those drivers working. Congratulations!

Also, don't worry about the shared IRQ with USB, all newer motherboards (P1+) do that.

Cheers,

Finegan

Hi finegan,
Thanks for your kind reply.
I think I am not bad situation. But yesterday my friend told me that I have an old mother board ( vesta, IM-VMB0102-P-16-01 ) and that does not support the card. ( It seems that the card is a pci 2.1 compatible ).
I tried many places to find what my board is ( www.motherbords.org / corporate site of vesta -- some www.ingrammicro.com ). But from nowhere I could find anything. One site had info about VMB0112. So I think this card won't work here. I will try it in new hp m/c in our dcf tomorrow.

Thanks,
--Sarin

You don't even have to bother looking up your motherboard specs, "dmesg" will tell you. Try:

dmesg | more

and look to see if there's a line something like:

PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfb430, last bus=1

That's off of a newer AMD board, but you'll still have the heading PCI: and some info after that which should tell you the PCI rev status.

Luck,

Finegan

Yes! I think I found it!.
This one right?
PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfb1d0, last bus=1
Thanks a lot for the help. I am starting it again!.
--Sarin.

Hi,
I tried ifconfig ( though the card was recognized and brought up initially) and iwconfig. Not much change. Got src for wireless-tools and compiled and tried. ( It asked me to get v14 extension but compiled and worked ) with this I got another error. This is what happens.

[root@fw-ee net2_bantumi]# ifconfig eth1
eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:05:5D:EE:E2:91
inet addr:192.168.23.23 Bcast:192.168.23.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:10 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:768 (768.0 b)
Interrupt:5 Base address:0xa000 Memory:d4000000-d4000fff

[root@fw-ee net2_bantumi]# iwconfig eth1
eth1 no wireless extensions.

[root@fw-ee wireless_tools.24]# ./iwconfig eth1
eth1 no wireless extensions.

[root@fw-ee wireless_tools.24]# iwconfig eth1 essid "TEST"
SIOCSIWESSID: Invalid argument

[root@fw-ee wireless_tools.24]# ./iwconfig eth1 essid "TEST"
Error for wireless request "Set ESSID" (8B1A) :
SET failed on device eth1 ; Invalid argument.
I find that the hardware address is unique ( not any of my eth cards). I was doing some reading on this. Only some drivers seems to support the options of iwconfig. But I found orinoco as one of them. So that should not be a problem. Any idea where I am going wrong?.
Thanks,
--Sarin.
PS: ./iwconfig is the new one I downloaded.

No I'm a bit at a loss. I've never been able to give a wireless device an IP address and have it NOT return iwconfig statistics... are you certain the wireless card is device eth1?

Also, have you tried the hostap_pci module again to see if it has similar errors? It also works with wireless extensions.

Cheers,

Finegan

Hi finegan,
Yes, thats the wireless card!
I tried that also and their utils too. It kept telling me about no private ioctls being present. I think its time to open the driver?.
Also I have been reading the other thread about linksys stuff. I found you suggesting some changes in hermes.conf there. Here also, I find there is no entry for DWL-520. Should I make one and recompile?. If so how to make that entry ( just substitute 650 with 520? ).

Thanks,
--Sarin

hermes.conf is just a configuration file for cardmgr to read on a laptop, that's strictly a pcmcia cardbus issue. A PCI card is a much simpler monster.

"iwpriv" will show no private ioctls because prism2 cards don't support that feature. "iwconfig" is the important part. "iwconfig" will show and is used to manipulate all of the features of the card, the rest of the tools come in handy for some other things, but for the most part its "iwconfig" all the way. I wish I had one of these things to play with too so I could be of more help.

Let's tackle this from the bottom up, when you:

modprobe orinoco_pci

What is then at the end of:

dmesg

This should give the beginning information necessary to see if the module is at least driving the card.

Cheers,

Finegan

finegan, this is what appeared in dmesg.

orinoco.c 0.11b (David Gibson <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au> and others)
Detected Orinoco/Prism2 PCI device at 01:07.0, mem:0xD4000000 to 0xD4000FFF -> 0xc48ea000, irq:5
Reset done................................................................................................ .................................................................................................... ...................................................;
Clear Reset............................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... ......;
pci_cor : reg = 0x0 - C3FD - C3CB
eth1: Station identity 001f:0004:0001:0003
eth1: Looks like an Intersil firmware version 1.03
eth1: Ad-hoc demo mode supported
eth1: IEEE standard IBSS ad-hoc mode supported
eth1: WEP supported, 104-bit key
eth1: MAC address 00:05:5D:EE:E2:91
eth1: Station name "Prism I"
eth1: ready

Also log messages had this

Jul 23 05:57:14 fw-ee kernel: pci_cor : reg = 0x0 - C3FD - C3CB
Jul 23 05:57:14 fw-ee modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module net-pf-4
Jul 23 05:57:14 fw-ee modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module net-pf-5

I will search for this net-pf-* stuff
--Sarin

Ok, just looked for that in google. Found they are remainings of 1.3.80 kernel and harmless.
--Sarin

If you bring the device up with an:

ifconfig eth1 192.168.2.2 up

Do any errors appear in dmesg?

What about if you assign values to the card:

iwconfig eth1 mode managed
iwconfig eth1 essid testing
iwconfig eth1 rate auto

Any errors there? Oh, the net-pf-4 stuff, its just some standard errors created by some hacked up goop that RedHat has in their /etc/modules.conf file. Its unrelated.

Cheers,

Finegan

Finegan, I think I got the problem. In a way my friend was correct.
This is what I just found from DLINK site.

Along with the advanced wireless technology that is incorporated into the DWL-520, wide range motherboard support is assured by compliance to the latest PCI 2.2 standard interface.

So, I was looking for pci 2.1 but it was pci 2.2 . I am sorry for all this trouble. I will try to find a better m/c.
Thanks a lot for all your help.
Will come back If I get more trouble.
Thanks,
--Sarin

too advance for me!!!
i'm lost in the conversation...!

hehehe :-)

soon, soon my friends...

I checked out the bit because I was a little curious as to why Dlink would make a card that was only compatible with the last six months or so of motherboards. I think they're trying to assure people with brand spanking new boards that this card is backwards compatible. Actually, from the READMEs within the www.linux-wlan.net drivers (which you can try too, but ICK, they're a mess), that this card will probably work with a 2.0 PCI bios.

Cheers,

Finegan