Networking :: WG511 v2  Help please



most all my wireless cards use wlan0, except for my orinoco gold, which uses eth0

73
ke4nt
Good morning Guys,

As you may have noticed I am not very good at explaining things. I'd never make it as a tech writer. Let me try and address your questions and maybe we can go from there. I still haven't gotten my laptop back but I am able to give you an idea of what I have done.

Prism54.o is detected during boot but there is a script returned during boot that says it is being ignored. I used DSLpanel to set thing up before I tried to do ifconfig eth0 up.  I don't think I assumed that the card was identified as eth0. When I did iwconfig all the correct info was returned for the card and it was identified as eth0. The very first line however reported that it was not ready. I did notice that one of the scripts called ifconfig -a, but I can't tell you the results. After I complete all these steps(maybe others) I look for a config file and none has been created.

Maybe I should just use my orinoco gold 11b,  it works fine. Just a little slow for file transfers. I will continue to try and make the netgear work and would like any other ideas.

David
DSLpanel has many options.  Do you mean Wlanconfig?
If things aren't working for you, I suggest you avoid using Wlanconfig and set things up manually.  That way you will be able to see the details of any errors.

Run "ifconfig -a".  This will show all valid network interfaces.  You will see the loopback "lo" and I suspect you will see "wlan0" ... especially since you said you saw "no such device or directory" in reference to eth0.  Let's assume you see wlan0.  There will be no IP address or netmask value at this stage since the interface is not active.

Now run -
iwconfig wlan0 essid MYESSID key 1234567890 mode Managed
Do you get a positive response?  If so, run -
pump -i wlan0
to do a DHCP negotiation and bring up the interface.
Well now I have my laptop back and have been able to try this stuff out.

Ipconfig -a shows lo and eth0. Iwconfig shows lo and eth0. I also tried the wg511 in my other laptop that has a full featured distro installed and the card is detected as eth0 and works fine so the card is good. I ran iwconfig manually and it returned with no error. I did pump -i and after a long wait it returned operation failed.

By watching things a bit closer I may have discovered the cause of the failure. First I followed the steps in the following link.

[URL=http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....;t=6753]

After this I added the changes to the backup script so things would be backed up and restored during boot. Here is what I beleive may be the problem. Again this is a frugal install. When DSL boots it looks for the firmware described in the link above. Since this happens before the backup is restored the firmware file is not there. It is restored, but to far into RPL to be loaded so even though prism54.o is loaded it has nothing to talk to. I don't know if there is any way to remedy this short of a remaster. That would be outside the scope of the reason I use the frugal install. If any of you scripting wizards know of a way to script this so it could be added to the boot file I would love to hear about it. I am not much of a programmer so if no one has any ideas how to accomplish this through scripting I guess I will just revert to the 11b and be happy.

Of course I could be totally wrong about this.

David
Good progress, what you say makes sense.  Your extra firmware files are possibly being restored too late, after the prism54 driver has loaded.

You could try unloading the driver - "rmmod prism54", then (once firmware files are in place) reload it - "modprobe prism54".  Though there's a chance the driver won't unload with a warning something like "device is busy".

Or a simple solution might be to wait for DSL to load and firmware files in place before inserting the wireless PCMCIA card.
Next Page...
original here.