Re: D-Link DWL650 D-Link DWL900 and Debian
Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ling.ucsc.edu> writes:
> My initial difficulty was that the D-Link DWL900 access point can be
> configured only with Windows tools and utilities. I have no access to
> any Windows machines, so I wasn't able to do any configuration at all
> on that end.
I just bought one of these but haven't unpacked it yet (I'm in the
process of moving, so leaving it in my office means [a] it doesn't
distract me and [b] I don't have to move it twice). The Web claims
that it's configurable with SNMP, and I thought most things of this
sort also at HTTP-based configuration (bleh). But I'd be interested
to know if it's really completely unconfigurable under Linux.
> Or at any rate it works fairly well. I get a lot of error-messages
> like this:
>
> Tx error, status 1 (FID=00F0)
I get a lot of these too, with an Orinoco-based card, drivers built
from pcmcia-source, and a 2.4.19 kernel under sid. They seem to be
harmless though annoying.
> I'm puzzled mainly by the sense that it shouldn't be working this
> well. If I understand correctly, the D-Link DWL650 is a prism card and
> is best supported by drivers made available in the linux-wlan-ng
> package.
I'm a little unclear as to how linux-wlan-ng is supposed to be
"better". I had a very brief venture with it this week and had a lot
of issues with it; its different device name (wlan0, where my wireless
card is eth0 in the pcmcia-cs world) and a system hang drove me away
pretty quickly.
> In getting that package to work, though, I got stalled by the
> requirement of compiling a new kernel-module, which required both
> the kernel-source and the independent (non-kernel) pcmcia-cs
> source. My pcmcia stuff works well at present; I've hand-compiled
> pcmcia source in the past. If I can avoid doing it again, I'd like
> to, especially if installing and hand-compiling it might compromise
> things that work well at present. But if I thought it would stop the
> flow of Tx error messages, and would improve performance, and if I
> thought that it wouldn't break existing working systems, I'd
> certainly take this step also.
So probably the best way to do this:
(1) Install kernel-package, bin86, fakeroot, and libncurses-dev.
(2) Acquire kernel source. 'apt-get install kernel-source-2.4.18' will
get you a bzip2'd tarball in /usr/src; unpack it somewhere (the
exact location doesn't matter).
(3) Configure it. cd to the top level of the unpacked kernel source
tree. If you're using a stock kernel, copy
/boot/config-(appropriate-string) to .config. Otherwise, run
'make menuconfig' or something equivalent.
(4) 'apt-get install pcmcia-source'. cd to /usr/src and run 'tar xzf
pcmcia-cs.tar.gz'. This will create a source tree in
/usr/src/modules/pcmcia-cs.
(5) cd to /usr/src/modules. Run 'apt-get source linux-wlan-ng'. This
will create a source tree in
/usr/src/modules/linux-wlan-ng-(version).
(6) cd back to your kernel source tree. Run 'make-kpkg --rootcmd
fakeroot --revision custom.1 kernel-image' (unless you're running
a stock kernel, then skip this). When this returns, run 'fakeroot
make-kpkg modules-image'.
(7) In the directory above your kernel source tree, you will have .deb
packages for your kernel, the PCMCIA modules, and the
linux-wlan-ng modules. As root, run 'dpkg --install' on all of
them.
You may also need to do some configuration in /etc/pcmcia to cause the
linux-wlan-ng drivers to be used over the stock pcmcia-cs ones. For
more details on the kernel build, read
/usr/share/doc/kernel-package/README.Debian.
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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