Sparklan WL385F USB wlan?

[Toralf Lund]

Toralf Lund wrote:

> Has anybody got the Sparklan WL-385F USB WLAN adapter 
> (http://www.sparklan.com/wl385f.htm) to work on a Fedora setup? I've 
> tried various "built-in" drivers as well as the "Prism2" ones on 
> http://www.linux-wlan.com, but with no luck so far. The unit shows up 
> in usbview, and the kernel module loads with no complaints, but I'm 
> not actually able to start networking; I get a "no device present" 
> error message. Actually, Linux driver sourcecode is downloadable from 
> Sparklan's web site, too, but I can't get it to build, and it just 
> looks like it's just an older version of the linux-wlan code (which is 
> why I tested that one.)

I asked Sparklan support about this, and got an answer only a few hours 
later saying:

>Thanks for writing us.
>  Regarding your question , please refer to the website as below,
>  https://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-lc100020/
>
>WL-385F is based on Zydas 1201 chipset not prism chipset, so do not use
>any prism driver.
>

And indeed, once I managed to build the driver after a bit of struggling 
(partly caused by a well-known problem of a missing ieee802_11.h), it 
all Just Worked... I got a wlan0 device, and the networking 
automatically starts and stops as I plug in or remove the USB unit - 
without doing any sort of config besides the driver installation. Or at 
least, I don't *think* I did; I messed about quite a bit with various 
config files while trying to get linux-wlan to work, so I'm not 100% 
sure that I had a "clean" setup when I installed the new driver...

That's with the "new" zd1201 driver here - the sf project also has an 
"old", linux-wlan based version which seems to be identical to the one 
found on Sparklan's web site. This is apparently modified to support 
other chipsets than the original linux-wlan code, so I was wrong in 
assuming that Prism2 was used (well, Sparklan told be that already, of 
course.)

- T