[FC2] Best option for PCMCIA Wireless card
Thomas Molina
tmolina at cablespeed.com
Tue Jun 8 03:23:57 UTC 2004
On Thu, 3 Jun 2004, Gustavo Matheus Rahal wrote:
> I did a search in the list and a lot of googling and didn't come to a
> conclusion about a good option of a PCMCIA Wireless card running on FC2.
> There was a discussion about a Orinoco card but with different opinions.
> I would like that people that had success setting a wireless card could
> give information about the card (the specific model) and how they did to
> get it to work. I think it would help a lot of people in the list.
Sorry I am so late in replying to this message. I had to make time to
install FC2 on my laptop to test my favorite wireless card. I finally got
to it this evening and had mixed success. Later, when I have time I will
submit an item to bugzilla with all the gory details. For now I will pass
on the results of my testing.
My laptop is a Compaq Presario 12XL325 with a 650MHz PIII cpu. My
favorite wireless ethernet card is an SMC2632W. It uses the orinoco,
orinoco_cs, and hermes modules, in addition to the usual pcmcia modules.
Getting it working, however, was not straightforward. When pcmcia
services are started during bootup I get a message in /var/log/messages
saying no sockets found. All the right modules are loaded, but nothing
works.
What I had to do to get things working is wait until the system is fully
up. When I can log in as root I can get things working. I first have to
unload all the modules by hand. Using the "service pcmcia stop" command
does not unload any of the modules. Once I have issued the stop command
and unloaded all the modules I then issue the "service pcmcia start"
command. It then finds the socket and inserting/removing the card works
as expected.
The no socket found message seems independent of whether the card is
inserted or not during boot. I was not able to configure the card during
install because (big assumption here) of the observed no socket found
noted above. In order to configure the card and the resulting eth0 I had
to resort to the manual removal of the modules, followed by restarting
pcmcia and inserting the card. I could then use the GUI to add a new
wireless device as normal.
I apologize if the above is not as coherent as I would like. I am going
to bed now. As I said, I will enter a bugzilla item when I can. I guess
I should have tested the laptop before now. I hope this helps someone.
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