I have spent the last couple days trying to install a Netgear WG511 (not a WG511T) PCMCIA wireless LAN card on my IBM T21 running Slackware 12.

The firmware (isl3890 version 2.7.0.0)is installed in /lib/firmware and the card is detected as Prism54.

During boot, "triggering udev events"
is followed by:
SIOCSIFHWADDR: Input/Output Error
SIOCSIFFLAGS: Operation not permitted

After logging in as root, iwconfig reports that eth1 is "NOT READY".

I believe this situation is due to the fact that when this card is detected before the firmware loads, it has a generic MAC address which changes when the firmware is loaded.

I did find a post where a Mandriva user addressed this by writing a udev rule which downed the card and brought it back up with the new MAC address. I tried this and the card disappeared completely from iwconfig.

I have tried manually changing the MAC address using ifconfig and I get the same error messages noted above.

I would appreciate any Slackware 12 user who is successfully using this card telling me how you did it and what changes you have made to which files.

Read through this post and see if you have the softmac card or not.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=295200

Brian

I discovered this morning that I had downloaded the wrong firmware version from prism54.org. I had downloaded 2.7.0.0.arm and I needed 1.0.4.3.arm.
Once I copied the correct version to /lib/firmware/isl3890, my problem was (partially) solved. The card now comes up active and properly identifies the ACCESS POINT (router) by MAC address. However it will not allow me to connect to or thru the router. iwconfig reports Link Quality:0, Signal Level:0 and Noise Level:197.

The same card and router work fine with Windows 2000 so I assume some setting (in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 ?) is preventing connection. I do not have WEP or WPA set in either the card or the router, and the mode is set to "Managed". Everything else seems ok.

Any suggestions?

I found this thread which appeared to describe the same problem as I have had http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...A0#post2966581
so I decided to try his solution. It worked! (Still don't know what the actual problem was though.)