[FC2] Best option for PCMCIA Wireless card
Chris Kloiber
ckloiber at ckloiber.com
Tue Jun 8 07:50:25 UTC 2004
On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 11:23, Thomas Molina wrote:
> 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.
Granted I have an x86_64 laptop, but try some or all of the kernel boot
options: noapic pci=noacpi,usepirqmask or noacpi and see if that allows
you to boot with the wireless nic. On an 'open' wireless lan (no
security) my pcmcia orinco_cs will find the network with no
configuration at all using these options. Using wireless security
obviously does require running system-config-network.
--
Chris Kloiber
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