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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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