I have an ECS Green 732 desknote with two LAN cards - a normal ethernet card and an Actiontec miniPCI WLAN card. The latter is a Prism 2.5 PCI card (Harris Semiconductor / Intersil).

I have a dual boot configuration with Windows 2000 and Mandrake Linux 9.1. WLAN with W2K works perfectly, with no hardware errors.

If I install MDK 9.1 and configures the network, the computer will freeze during installation - there is no way to configure only one of the two network cards at this stage. Installing _without_ entering network configuration works OK. I can then choose to configure only the standard ethernet card without enabling the WLAN card.

dmesg shows that the WLAN card is identified and the Orinoco module is loaded without incident:

-------------- snip -----------------
hermes.c: 4 Jul 2002 David Gibson
orinoco.c 0.13a (David Gibson and others)
orinoco_pci.c 0.13a (Jean Tourrilhes )
PCI: Enabling device 00:05.0 (0010 -> 0012)
PCI: Found IRQ 9 for device 00:05.0
PCI: Sharing IRQ 9 with 00:02.6
PCI: Sharing IRQ 9 with 00:02.7
Detected Orinoco/Prism2 PCI device at 00:05.0, mem:0xE8006000 to 0xE8006FFF -> 0xe4b30000, irq:9
done............................................. ................................................. ................................................. ................................................. ................................................. Reset .....;
Reset............................................ ................................................. ................................................. ................................................. ................................................. ................................................. ................................................. ................................................. ................................................. ................................................. Clear .................;
pci_cor : reg = 0x0 - BE5 - BB3
eth1: Station identity 001f:0006:0001:0003
eth1: Looks like an Intersil firmware version 1.3.6
eth1: Ad-hoc demo mode supported
eth1: IEEE standard IBSS ad-hoc mode supported
eth1: WEP supported, 104-bit key
eth1: MAC address 00:20:E0:8F:41:D1
eth1: Station name "Prism I"
eth1: ready
-------------- snip -----------------

I know that there are _other_ drivers for Prism2 cards available in addition to orinoco, namely host-ap and wlan-ng, but from what I read the orinoco driver should at least _work_ with a Prism2 card - it shouldn't make the OS freeze up (or perhaps heat up: the CPU seems to be running for its life as witnessed by the CPU fan buzzing) with mouse and keyboard useless?

A description of how to get a card of this kind up with linux-wlan-ng can be found at http://www.balukoff.com/~stephen/a30p/ but I'd like to see if I can get it to work with a normal MDK 9.1 installation only by tweaking configuration files.

I see that modules.conf has a line

alias eth1 orinoco_pci

Would it work better if one used a device wlan0 rather than eth1 ?

The contents of ifcfg.eth1 is as follows:

DEVICE=eth1
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
ONBOOT=no
WIRELESS_MODE=Auto
WIRELESS_ESSID=any
WIRELESS_NWID=MYOWNLAN
WIRELESS_FREQ=6
WIRELESS_SENS=-80
WIRELESS_RATE=11M
WIRELESS_RTS=auto
WIRELESS_FRAG=auto
NEEDHOSTNAME=yes

I should add that a SuSE Linux Office Desktop 8.1 installation also "freezes" when attempting to bring up the WLAN. I haven't tried a RedHat 9 installation yet, just downloaded the ISOs yesterday.