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Message from Steven
===================

I recently purchased several Orinoco Gold 
wireless cards (for $2 each) and tried them
out on BL3.  They performed very nicely.  

This type of card was very common a few years 
ago and appeared under many different names:
Compaq WL110, IBM Wireless LAN Card, Araya,
Buffalo, Agere, Lucent, Dell Trumobile 1150,
Enterasys Roamabout, Proxim, etc.  Orinoco
Silver is the same card, but it does less
encryption. 

Apparently these cards have the same manfid 
number and perform (more or less) the same.
The following additions to /etc/pcmcia/config
should (hopefully) find any of those cards:
-----------------------------------
device "wvlan_cs"
  class "network" module "wvlan_cs"
-----------------------------------
-----------------------
card "Orinoco Wireless"
  manfid 0x0156, 0x0002
  bind "wvlan_cs"
-----------------------
You will also need to download the wvlan_cs
module (from the BL3 site) and put it in
/lib/modules/2.2.26/pcmcia

I think that is all you need when you use
an access point.  However, I do not have
an access point so I had to do two more
steps.  At the bottom of /etc/pcmcia/config
I added the following line:
------------------------------------
module "wvlan_cs" opts "port_type=3"
------------------------------------
This enables the card to connect to other
cards (ad-hoc mode).  Without this line,
the card defaults to port_type=1 which
connects only to access points.

Then I used ifconfig and iwconfig to set 
the parameters for the wireless connection:
----------------------------------------------------
ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.4
iwconfig eth0 essid "BLnet" channel 4 enc 1234567ABC
----------------------------------------------------
If you don't want encryption, leave out the
the enc parameter (I timed the connection
and encryption slowed traffic about 15%).

If you are trying to connect to an encrypted
access point, you will need to use iwconfig
to set the key (as above).  

Last year, I compiled a version of iwconfig 
(and other wireless tools) for BL3 and uploaded 
it to the BL3 site.  The package is still there: 
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.basiclinux.com.ru/add-ons/wireless.tgz
-------------------------------------------------
The tools are not very user-friendly, but they 
do appear to work.

If you have any questions about wireless networking
for BL3, do not hesitate to ask.  After experimenting
with these cards, I have a much better understanding 
of the fundamentals.

Cheers,
Steven