DWL-G650 working!

[Scot L. Harris]

I had posted in the last few days regarding my Dell Latitude CPx laptop
and a DWL-G650 wireless adapter.

The good news is that I have it working.

The DWL-G650 I have is a revision A1.  This revision uses a prism chip
set.  Subsequent revisions I believe use a different chipset (possibly
atheros but I am not sure).

After installing FC2 you need to download the tar ball from
http://prism54.org.  The file I downloaded was
prism54-cvs-latest.tar.bz2.

After downloading I ran the following commands:

tar xjf prism54-cvs-latest.tar.bz2
cd prism54-cvs-latest
make clean modules
(su to root)
make install
depmod -a


In my case everything worked as expected.

You also need to get firmware which will be downloaded to the card when
it is initialized.  You can get this from
http://prism54.org/~mcgrof/firmware/.  I used the latest one
1.0.4.3.arm.   

The firmware file needs to go in /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware directory. 
This needed to be created:

mkdir -p /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/

copy the 1.0.4.3.arm file to the firmware directory as isl3890.

At this point I went through several iterations with the GUI network
wizard and network config tools.  This is where it got a little
strange.  I had to delete all network interfaces.  I also have a xircom
card for hardwire and modem access.  After deleting all interfaces I
reinserted the DWL-G650 card.  At this point the system recognized the
card.  In the network wizard the card was listed as an Intersil ISL3890
[Prism GT/Prism Duette] card.  I created a wireless interface and
configured the SSID and wep options.  Once that was done I was surprised
to find that the interface was up and running.

The odd thing is that in the network configuration GUI the card is not
listed as the Intersil ISL3890 as it was initially.  It is listed as a
Xircom Cardbus ethernet.  

I suspect that the DWL-G650 card is not listed somewhere and as such is
not being listed as such.

I also suspect that when I try to use the Xircom card I have that I will
have to delete all network interfaces and add it back in.  

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get both cards configured so
that when I put a card in the correct configuration is used?

Also is there and easy way to manage multiple wireless configurations? 
It is going to be inconvenient to have to reconfigure wep settings for
different locations and uses.

Hopefully this information will help someone else with this setup.  
 
-- 
Scot L. Harris <webid at cfl.rr.com>