Wireless Laptop 802.11b - SUCCESS! (finally)
I am absolutely stunned that I finally got this working. Honestly, I've
been hacking here and there, trying to get my laptop to work with my
3COM AirConnect 3CRWE737A 802.11b PCMCIA card for about a month and a
half, with no luck and lots of frustration. I know the
chipsets/firmware in these cards changes sometimes without the name of
the product changing, which can cause problems when referencing various
Howtos.
The solution that finally worked was the simplest. By using the stock
orinoco_cs driver in the bf24 Debian kernel, I'm now able to get an ip
address from my WAP, albeit without WEP. The orinoco_cs driver
apparently comes from turning on support for HERMES chipset/pcmcia cards
during Debian installion (or in kernel recompiling, I imagine). Many of
the howtos for this particular NIC suggested recompiling the kernel,
using third-party drivers, and all kinds of .conf file hacking. All of
those might very well lead to a better connection and better security
support, but I'm relatively new to *nix and it was all a bit over my head.
After turning on the HERMES/orinoco_cs stuff, it was simply a matter of
apt-getting the "wireless-tools" package and running "iwconfig eth0"--it
found my WAP automatically and assigned an ip.
At any rate, I'm overjoyed to have it working. If anyone has a similar
card and similar frustrations, feel free to shoot me an email with
questions. Further, if anyone with this model got things working
*better*, let me know! I know WEP is easily cracked, but I would still
like that false sense of security!
Thanks much to the debian-user archives for many bits of knowledge!!!
Sincerely,
M. Kirchhoff
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