Re: wireless PCI card [SOLVED]
hi ya jason
great summary .. even better that it worked ..
- close your eyes to those that dont like top-posting :-)
c ya
alvin
On Tue, 15 Mar 2005, Jason Rennie wrote:
> Let me say thanks to everyone who helped me figure this out. Rodney,
> Sergio, Alvin: I thank you.
>
> For anyone else who is in my situation, here's what I had to do to get
> the card working...
>
> I bought a new Hawking Tech. HWP54G-CA card because I learned that
> it used a Linux-supported chipset: the PrismGT.
>
> When it arrived, I installed it on my Debian Sarge machine, booted the
> machine up and... it didn't work! Argh! I quickly began trying to
> figure out what was wrong. Was the card recognized at all? Were
> there drivers for the card? lspci revealed that the card was found
> and recognized:
>
> jrennie@syrah:~$ lspci -v
> [snip]
> 0000:00:0b.0 Network controller: Intersil Corporation Intersil ISL3890 [Prism
> +GT/Prism Duette] (rev 01)
> Subsystem: Unknown device 17cf:0020
> Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 12
> Memory at cfff4000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
> Capabilities: <available only to root>
> [snip]
>
> lsmod revealed that Debian had even loaded the prism54 driver:
>
> jrennie@syrah:~$ lsmod
> [snip]
> prism54 45932 0 (unused)
> firmware_class 3980 0 [prism54]
> [snip]
>
> Some reading on mailing lists led me to try ndiswrapper. I wasted a
> few hours building ndiswrapper kernel modules. Turns out ndiswrapper
> was no help. For those of you playing at home: don't try ndiswrapper.
>
> More reading revealed that chipsets like mine (Intersil ISL3890
> PrismGT) require "firmware". The prism54 is the right module, but it
> requires firmware for the specific chipset. During boot and when I
> ran "/etc/init.d/networking restart", I saw complaints to the effect
> of "request for firmware failed for isl3890". Firmware for Prism
> GT/Duette is available here:
>
> http://prism54.org/~mcgrof/firmware/
>
> I downloaded 1.0.4.3.arm and copied it to /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware.
> More reading revealed that this file should be renamed to the name of
> your chipset. In my case, it should be renamed to 'isl3890'.
> I.e. after much trial-and-error, I effectively did this:
>
> sudo mv 1.0.4.3.arm /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/isl3890
>
> With that in place, all I had to do was to add an appropriate entry to
> /etc/network/interfaces. Though, this tripped me up too. Somewhere,
> someone suggested that the device name for the card would be wlan0.
> Nope, it was eth1 (not eth0 since the regular ethernet card took
> that). Easy way to find out the correct device name is to run
> /sbin/iwconfig (in the wireless-tools package) without any arguments.
> This is what mine looked like (before I had it working):
>
> jrennie@syrah:~$ /sbin/iwconfig
> lo no wireless extensions.
>
> eth0 no wireless extensions.
>
> eth1 NOT READY! ESSID:off/any
> Mode:Managed Channel:0 Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
> Tx-Power=31 dBm Sensitivity=0/200
> Retry min limit:0 RTS thr=0 B Fragment thr=0 B
> Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
> Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
> Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
>
> Finally, all I had to do was add this entry to /etc/network/interfaces:
>
> auto eth1
> iface eth1 inet dhcp
>
> After a reboot, the card came up without a problem. Next reboot, I
> disabled my on-board ethernet card so that the wireless card got eth0.
>
> This set-up works for both 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels (I've tested on one
> 2.4 and one 2.6). The real key was installing the firmware and
> knowing what to name it. In theory, installation should be as easy as:
>
> wget http://prism54.org/~mcgrof/firmware/1.0.4.3.arm
> sudo mv 1.0.4.3.arm /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/isl3890
> sudo halt
> # Remove or disable regular ethernet card.
> # Boot up your fancy new machine with wireless ethernet
>
> The wireless card should get eth0; as long as you have the standard
> eth0 entry in your /etc/network/interfaces, it should be brought up
> during boot.
>
> Jason
>
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