Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

A very long discussion of my problems NOT getting pcmcia wireless working 
in BL3 or Win98, on a laptop that may be broken.

I have two cards (noncardbus) that should work with orinoco_cs but do not:

On Thu, 7 Dec 2006 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> > Lucent PC24E-H-FC (orinoco.o)
> > Cisco aironet air-pcm340 (airo.o)
>
> Those should work.  You will need to edit /etc/pcmcia/config
> ------------------------------------------
> device "airo_cs"
>  class "network" module "airo", "airo_cs"
> ------------------------------------------
> or
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> device "orinoco_cs"
>  class "network" module "hermes", "orinoco", "orinoco_cs"
> ----------------------------------------------------------
>
> You will also need a module line to set the parameters for
> the wireless connection.  Something like this:
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> module "orinoco_cs" opts "port_type=3 channel=1 station_name=MY_PC"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------

For my setup it is probably port_type=1 infrastructure and no channel.
port_type=3 is adhoc for linking two computers rather than a network of 
one central computer and several others.  ??

The card must also be defined as the relevant device.  I ran cardmgr and 
it told me some product info on the Linksys and Lucent cards, but said no 
product info was available for the Cisco Aironet card.  I looked up the 
drivers for these cards in PCMCIA howto and other sites.  There is even a 
Redhat WPC11 ver. 3 site which gives the manfid and bind lines.

I added for two WPC11 cards:

card "Linksys WPC11 Ver. 3"  [this line can be whatever you like]
  manfid 0x0274,0x0163
  bind "orinoco_cs"

and
card "lucent wavelan/ieee"
 manfid 0x0156,0x0002
 bind "orinoco_cs"
(This card may also work with wvlan_cs.o).

cardmgr (which needs to have the card removed and put back in for it to 
work again) says these cards are still all unsupported.

Any ideas?


I tested WPC11 ver 3 and ver 4 (I have drivers on CD) in Win98 but the ver 
4 does not find any signals (there should be at least 10 in my location) 
in my laptop, though it worked for someone else in their laptop.  (But I 
really don't know what I am doing, never having used wireless before). 
ver 3 says it is installed but I cannot find it again.

I suspect this computer has BIOS problems.  Sometimes it complains about 
A20 and won't load XMS memory manager.  Sometimes it finds too many serial 
ports.  Win98 will dial but not connect (says wrong password or wrong 
server, alternately) and we fixed that for a while by removing and putting 
back serial ports in bios until it worked (with pcmcia winmodem) but it is 
having the same problem again.  (Linux dials and connects but it ignores 
BIOS).  The text mode does not fill the screen and if I tell BIOS to 
expand it, graphics is bleached to illegibility (which is why a neighbor 
gave it to me).  And pcmcia socket 1 works only half the time so this 
would not make a good gateway (I need a wired network card too).  USB, 
floppy, CD-ROM and keyboard all work (our other 4 newer laptops each have 
one of these absent or bad).

This laptop came with Win98 (I added loop BL3) and in theory the cards 
should have worked with the supplied drivers.  I can't copy Win98 between 
hard drives with dd, to a laptop (and our non-cardbus pcmcia network cards 
are rather slow) so I will install the blasted thing on another 
laptop, so we can take the computer to the library to test with (until the 
neighbor planning to set up wireless figures out how, on his Mac).

This probably means I need to learn how to set SSID if I test on a laptop 
in linux.  I can replace my ISA sound card with an ISA PCMCIA controller 
to test on a desktop in linux, but I can't use BL3 to test the stack of 
cardbus pcmcia wireless cards that I ought to test for my neighbor who 
brought them home from where he volunteers, to test, but has no laptop.

I tried compile a 2.4.31 cardbus kernel but it flunked a cardbus ethernet 
card.  What is involved in getting cardbus to work?

We were given a 98lite Win98 installer that if you add explorer.exe and 
two other files from Win95, can cut Win98 to 50MB.  The CD-ROM drive in 
the other laptop only reads OEM CDs.  We have an IBM 'backpack' external 
parport CD-ROM drive with DOS software - has anyone used it in BL?  We can 
also copy CAB files via USB memory stick (in DOS, or with the 1-floppy USB 
boot disk that David Moberg put together).

I have stopped wondering why people gave us all these laptop computers.

> Cheers,
> Steven

Sindi