8:13 PM

After many, many defeats, a small victory! Tigana (on Red Hat 7.2) is now wireless.

From Red Hat Wireless LAN Network Setup:

Below is an example of a wireless PC Ethernet (802.11b) card we recently got for a laptop. The product in this example was a Netgear MA401. It only was claimed to be support Win 95/B, 98, Me, NT, 2000, and XP. But we wanted it to run under Red Hat Linux, too. So here’s how we got it to work. This example can be applied to various wireless PC cards with little or no modifications.

Cardctl
Cardctl is the Linux program to identify PCMCIA devices. To see a list of PCMCIA cards type the command “cardctl ident”. As shown below, the sample computer has a Netgear MA401 11Mbps PCMCIA Wireless Card in it.

It’s important to make a note of the line that begins with “manfid”. The first set of numbers is the manufacturer number, followed by the unique identity of this card model. These are the numbers Linux uses to configure the card during setup.

[root@localhost root]# cardctl ident
Socket 0:
product info: "NETGEAR MA401RA Wireless PC", "Card", "ISL37300P",
"Eval-RevA"
manfid: 0x000b, 0x7300
function: 6 (network)
Socket 1:
no product info available

Getting it to work…
Sometimes it takes a little digging around on the Internet to find out what driver to associate with a particular card. And sometimes it just takes some guesswork. In our case we decided to try the popular orinoco_cs driver. This driver works with many popular Wireless PCMCIA Ethernet adapters. However there are others, too, such as the pcnet_cs driver. Be sure to find out what your card needs… or try taking a guess!

We created a file called /etc/pcmcia/netgear.conf. In that file we put the text that follows:

card "Intersil PRISM2 11 Mbps Wireless Adapter"
manfid 0x000b, 0x7300
bind "orinoco_cs"

This was the equivalent of putting the text in the /etc/pcmcia/config file, but keeps things a bit more organized. (The /etc/pcmcia/config and all files that end in a .conf extension are all interpreted as one big file during startup.)

Now when our system boots up it will detect our Netgear card with the manufacturer ID 0x000b, and the product ID 0x7300. According to the netgear.conf file, it knows to recognize this card with the orinoco_cs driver. Provided the network configuration is set up properly, your card will be loaded up as eth0.

Additional Notes
Some PCMCIA drivers are still in development and may have slight quirks. Under Red Hat 7.2, our Netgear card ran fine, until we did very heavy transfers. At that point it would drive the softIRQ process crazy, and the card would lose connectivity. An upgrade to Red Hat 7.3 cured the problem. (Of course you can realize equal effects by installing a newer kernel on an older version of Linux.)