WG511 wireless troubles

mswales · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2003 Posts: 4

I previously had a D-Link 650+ (ACX100) which drove me insane. I never got it working. So, I ebayed a WG511. I followed the WG511 installation guide verbatim and got it to show up in lspci's output. Also, the small orange light seems to light up (though very dimly). The problem is that iwconfig shows only eth0 lo and eth1 with no wireless extensions. I've tried countless things and am completely baffled. I think the problem may be my built in ethernet controller. Lastly, everything is built in my kernel. No modules are loaded except for nvidia.

Could someone who has wireless working (even better if with WG511) give me some advice on things to check. Possibly post some configs? Thanks!

garn · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 10 Sep 2003 Posts: 131

i have a wg511t but the t is a big difference.

Yours I think you need the prism54 driver, I use atheros.

Anyway you say eth0, lo, and eth1 all show in iwconfig but none have wireless extensions? eth0 and lo shouldn't but eth1 (assuming eth1 is your card) should.

mswales · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2003 Posts: 4

Yeah. I followed the WG511 instruction thread. It shows in lspci and even is lit up. I need to know how to get the device showing in iwconfig and how to set it up and all. I'm fairly sure the prism drivers are loading alright for this reason.

lfkerby · Posted: Sun Jul 18, 2004 6:04 am Post subject:

I too have a WG511T so I can't give you a 'works here with ...' message (though my 511t
does work fine in 802.11g mode).

Based on your description, we need to see what the drivers say when they load. Look
through dmesg output or the system logs (/var/log/messages for many) for messages
concerning eth1 and/or the orinoco drivers. Lights on the cards can be misleading; I
have 6 or 7 different wireless cards and some blink when connected, others stay lit,
some have multiple lights that blink or stay lit. The only thing you really know without
experience with a specific card is that it has power if the light is on or flashing.

I just checked http://prism54.org/supported_cards.php and it appears that the
wg511 needs the prism54 driver, so make sure you are using that one.

elf · n00b Joined: 11 Dec 2003 Posts: 10

Okay, just bought a Netgear WG511 using the prism chipset. Took all day to figure out the problem with it. The lights were dim, and iwconfig gave all sorts of 'feature unsupported' errors, and the MAC address of the AP would randomly reset to all 0s.

The difference in my setup, when I ran /etc/net.eth0 stop, then iwconfig would show wireless extensions for the pcmcia card. When started, it would fail to associate with any AP, dmesg would talk about a full queue on the AP, and the green light would light up a bit.

The problem, was the firmware hotplug was using. Must have been a new revision, but I installed the windows drivers (dual boot) and copied wg511dcb.arm into /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware and renamed it isl3890, reloaded net.eth0, and the lights got brighter and the card associated with the AP on the first try.

If you don't have a windows partition, then I'm not sure where you could get the .arm windows firmware. But, if you find one, the version I got working had a file size of 123120bytes, and an md5sum of a07791fa148c2cc3da0992e1ea4e5f12

Hope you can get something useful from this.

edit: Forgot to say, running kernel 2.6.7 gentoo r8; with yenta, cardbuss, and prism2 built into the kernel. Spoke with several folks running all those as modules, works fine once you find the right firmware.