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torquillYou have been warned...
Okay. Let's start with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
emmett_the_sane, who was kind enough to spend $9 on a wireless card for me at Fry's. I had been unsuccessful in getting my Linksys card to play nice with Fedora Core 2; it had worked fine with RedHat 9, but after I upgraded, the wlan-ng drivers weren't available for anything above FC1 (they still aren't), and my brother and I spent hours building kernels and drivers and etc. with no success. So I told emmett_the_sane that if he could find something cheap, it was worth a try to see whether it would play nicer than the prism2 chip in my old card.
He picked up an SMC2635W card. I know nothing about this company, but when I looked up specs, there were a few slightly differing opinions as to what chipset it uses... the most recent info, however, seemed to say that it was an ADM8211 chip. I was led to this page written by someone who wrestled with that chip already, and he linked to the aluminum.sourmilk.net page I had seen mentioned elsewhere. Apparently the drivers supplied on that page had, in the Lone Star Aggie's opinion, "drop dead simple installation instructions". I'll buy that for a dollar.
I went to the drivers page, downloaded the latest one, untarred it and had a look at the INSTALL file. Simple, yes... but the requirements asked for a 2.6.9 kernel or better, and I had 2.6.8 (sigh). A full system update gave me 260 new packages, including the stock 2.6.10-1.771_FC2 kernel; I wasn't sure how to check whether that had all the necessary stuff compiled in, but I thought I'd give compiling the driver a shot anyway and see whether it died.
It didn't. Make spat out thirteen lines and a module (adm8211) which loaded just fine. I brought up my pcmcia services, plugged in the card, and found I could talk to it. After all the fighting with the prism2 wlan-ng drivers, this was shockingly easy.
So I went downtown (my local AP wasn't working) and sat across the street from the new brewpub to see whether their wireless lan was public. (It is.) I brought up eth1, pinged successfully, and I was in business -- just about out of the box. It was definitely the simplest setup I've had to do in a long time.
This chipset is getting more common, so it's good to know it's so well supported under (at least some) linuces. A look at the requirements for the driver suggests it would be fine under pretty much any of them, though -- the May 23, 2005 version of the driver wants the latest mod-init-tools (known as modutils in Fedora), the latest gcc 3.x or 2.95.x, the 2.6.9 kernel or newer (configured for kbuild, with Crypto API and the ARC4 cipher compiled in), the latest wireless-tools, and optionally the latest hotplug scripts. I'd expect Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, and maybe Gentoo to have much of that by default. FC2 and later does.
I came home, then, and mucked with my own AP... then discovered that most of the problem was that its ethernet cable was not actually plugged into the hub. (First rule of computers: It always works better if you plug it in.) Sigh. It is now happy, and I am currently connected only by wireless.
Add in the fact that my power system problems on the laptop seem to have been due to a short in the battery, and things are looking up... I swapped my old battery back in, the one that's almost four years old, and the problem was solved. The old battery seems to still have a decent amount of life in it, more than I remember -- at least an hour. So I can go really cordless now for the first time in a while. Yay!
Okay. Let's start with
emmett_the_sane, who was kind enough to spend $9 on a wireless card for me at Fry's. I had been unsuccessful in getting my Linksys card to play nice with Fedora Core 2; it had worked fine with RedHat 9, but after I upgraded, the wlan-ng drivers weren't available for anything above FC1 (they still aren't), and my brother and I spent hours building kernels and drivers and etc. with no success. So I told emmett_the_sane that if he could find something cheap, it was worth a try to see whether it would play nicer than the prism2 chip in my old card.He picked up an SMC2635W card. I know nothing about this company, but when I looked up specs, there were a few slightly differing opinions as to what chipset it uses... the most recent info, however, seemed to say that it was an ADM8211 chip. I was led to this page written by someone who wrestled with that chip already, and he linked to the aluminum.sourmilk.net page I had seen mentioned elsewhere. Apparently the drivers supplied on that page had, in the Lone Star Aggie's opinion, "drop dead simple installation instructions". I'll buy that for a dollar.
I went to the drivers page, downloaded the latest one, untarred it and had a look at the INSTALL file. Simple, yes... but the requirements asked for a 2.6.9 kernel or better, and I had 2.6.8 (sigh). A full system update gave me 260 new packages, including the stock 2.6.10-1.771_FC2 kernel; I wasn't sure how to check whether that had all the necessary stuff compiled in, but I thought I'd give compiling the driver a shot anyway and see whether it died.
It didn't. Make spat out thirteen lines and a module (adm8211) which loaded just fine. I brought up my pcmcia services, plugged in the card, and found I could talk to it. After all the fighting with the prism2 wlan-ng drivers, this was shockingly easy.
So I went downtown (my local AP wasn't working) and sat across the street from the new brewpub to see whether their wireless lan was public. (It is.) I brought up eth1, pinged successfully, and I was in business -- just about out of the box. It was definitely the simplest setup I've had to do in a long time.
This chipset is getting more common, so it's good to know it's so well supported under (at least some) linuces. A look at the requirements for the driver suggests it would be fine under pretty much any of them, though -- the May 23, 2005 version of the driver wants the latest mod-init-tools (known as modutils in Fedora), the latest gcc 3.x or 2.95.x, the 2.6.9 kernel or newer (configured for kbuild, with Crypto API and the ARC4 cipher compiled in), the latest wireless-tools, and optionally the latest hotplug scripts. I'd expect Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, and maybe Gentoo to have much of that by default. FC2 and later does.
I came home, then, and mucked with my own AP... then discovered that most of the problem was that its ethernet cable was not actually plugged into the hub. (First rule of computers: It always works better if you plug it in.) Sigh. It is now happy, and I am currently connected only by wireless.
Add in the fact that my power system problems on the laptop seem to have been due to a short in the battery, and things are looking up... I swapped my old battery back in, the one that's almost four years old, and the problem was solved. The old battery seems to still have a decent amount of life in it, more than I remember -- at least an hour. So I can go really cordless now for the first time in a while. Yay!
