[wellylug] DSE pcmcia wlan

Sam Cannell sam at plaz.net.nz
Wed Jun 2 14:30:50 NZST 2004


I decided it wasn't really worth it...  I was planning on getting the
3Com one anyway, and the DSE one I got was something of an impulse buy
for the interim.

As it turns out, I managed to borrow the Intel one I mentioned until I
got this one (although the Intel didn't work in Linux either)

The 3com one was trivial to set up in Linux.  The kernel has atmel
pcmcia support - all I had to do was drop the firmware in
/usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/, and hotplug and cardmgr did the rest.

I guess it really pays to know what you're buying when it comes to
wireless ethernet under Linux .. I found the list of cards at
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/ to be really
useful.

That site has the following to say about the Realtek 8180 driver for the
Dick Smiths card:

"Realtek has released a binary driver for their device, with precompiled
version for Red-Hat and SuSE. The driver doesn't use Wireless Extension
(but some private extensions), and has a strange setup procedure (manual
enable, require proper commands in the proper sequence). 

I didn't try this driver, but I got some feedback from many users. The
driver version before 1.2 were difficult to install and prone to crash
the kernel. The version 1.2 had many troubles (such as reassociation),
but was working. Version 1.3 is more stable, but a little too talkative.

Version 1.4 of the driver also add support for making the card an Access
Point."

Unfortunately I'm not sure which driver version I was using on my laptop
- it was all done in a previous Linux install.

On Wed, 2004-06-02 at 14:08, Damon Lynch wrote:
> > I would have taken it back, but I lost the reciept.
> 
> Did you contact the DSE support people?  Probably their tech guru Chris
> Day would be keen to hear of experiences like this!! 
-- 
Sam Cannell <sam at plaz.net.nz>
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