PCMCIA Wireless

Forum: Laptops
Topic: PCMCIA Wireless
started by: Velcan

Posted by Velcan on July 09 2005,21:03

I have been searching Google and these forums for a bit now and no one else's questions seem to be matching up with exactly what I'm experiencing.

Basically my PCMCIA wireless device does not even give me a light indicating it has power. With other Linux distros I have used in the past it at least has this light and all I have had to do is install the drivers using ndiswrapper -i.

-The device is a D-Link DWL-G630 'AirPlus'
-The laptop itself is a Medion2010 (AMD 2200 XP-M)
* And I'm pretty sure this is using a VIA chipset ...
-I have confirmed the wireless device itself is functioning by plugging it into another laptop running Mepis and it operates fine

I'm crossing my fingers that this is a simple configuration error because I would still consider myself to be an intermediate Linux user ... so the more descriptive the better all you guru's

Thanks a ton in advance!
- Velcan

Posted by adssse on July 09 2005,21:14

You may want to take a look at the following thread. It is not the same card, but seems to be a similar problem.
< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....;t=6753 >

Posted by Velcan on July 09 2005,21:31

Yea. I actually id run across that one in my searches. The only thing that was holding me up is that I am not getting any errors similar to their ...

Quote

"request_firmware() failed for 'isl3890' "
"could not upload firmware ('isl3890') "

Where would I see errors like they were getting? Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place.

Posted by tempestuous on July 10 2005,04:44

No, that other post is not relevant to you ... wrong driver - prism54 for PrismGT chipset.

It's all very confusing because D-Link sources chipsets from everywhere across their product range.

It seems that most G630's had the Atheros chipset, for which there is a dedicated Linux driver from the madwifi project. DSL has this driver - ath_pci.o.
It looks like ndiswrapper will work for Atheros, too.

But there are some G630's, versions A and B apparently, which have the Texas Instruments chipset. There is a dedicated Linux driver for this from < http://acx100.sourceforge.net > but this driver is not in DSL.
However, ndiswrapper apparently works.

Since your card is not being detected by DSL, there's a fair chance you have the TI-based version.