PRISM54, WPA summarized

Version_M · n00b Joined: 05 Oct 2006 Posts: 1

I see a lot of people struggle to get the prism54 driver working with WPA encryption, including myself.
For trying to get a clear understanding on this subject, I'm posting my findings and my assumptions.

Let me summarize my findings after 2 days of google'ing:

Nobody seems to have the prism54 driver working with WPA
Gentoo is shipped with the 'default' prism54 driver, from prism54.org
The last modifications on that driver are dated June 2005.
Currently this driver does not support WPA/WPA2
It looks like work is in progress of patching this prism54 driver to support WPA/WPA2

I saw in the Unsupported Software forum a thread about this WPA path for the prism54.
Is this patch going to make it to be incorporated in the default Gentoo kernel?

I own a 3CRWE154G72 Rev01. This is the so called FullMac version.
This card does need the prism54 driver and doesn't work with the hostap driver

I hope people with the knowledge will give a response on my findings and conclusions,
so there will be a better understanding of the status and capability of this driver.

Thanks in advance.

badchien · Guru Joined: 16 Feb 2004 Posts: 415 Location: doghouse

Sounds about right. I also have a prism54/fullmac compatible card.

Last time I checked, WPA client-mode support was "almost there" but that was last year and although I listened for news for some time. it seems WPA support was never finished.

I did manage to get WPA working using ndiswrapper, however this was generally less stable than the prism54 drivers, and I didn't really want to use ndiswrapper anyway. Therefore I only use my prism54 card on open networks now. Next time I will make sure I get a fully supported card.