Wireless PRISM3 on an Averatec 3150p

hjlane3

Ok, i just got a friend of mine runnng linux and he's loving in. The only problem is that his wireless card isn't working. Now, from experience, I know mandrake is a great newbie distro so that's what I had him use to start off. I figured since you guys here are super great people, you'll still try to help me :-)

. Ok herej's the problem...
this wireless network card is drving me nuts. According to usbview it's a IEEE 802.11b PRISM3 USB (even though the casrd is built-in, it connects to the bus through USB) and is a AirVast Taiwan. I tried following the directions/info supplied here but I can't get mandrake to recognize a wlan0 device. At first I built my own version of wlan utils and drivers and installed them, then I notice there are kernel modules for prism2_usb (even thought it's a PRISM 3 card the prism2 drivers are suppose to work) already in the mdk kernel and the wlan utiles it uses in a mdk rpm. But, with both setups, I still can't get it to recognize a wlan0 device. Anyone have any ideas? I have a feeling it has something to do with the way mandrake is handling it, but I haven't been using mandrake myself for a while, and am not sure.
-HJ

Here is some input from my friend.....

Ok, I am the friend that his having the trouble with the wifi... User HJ is helping me with this pain in the neck... Here is an update as to where we are, and a summary of what we did.

We have followed all of the instructions posted over the internet and here in the forum with no go. The RC2 already has the wlan tools integrated with the kernel, so we didn't need to install the wlan package. We edited the prism2sta.c to follow your guidelines, and added the info to the modules.conf to associate wlan0 to the new devce driver, then rebuilt the entire kernel, utilizing the built in wifi package. Wlan comes up ok, but the device never registers in ifconfig. I type in dmesg after power-cycling the wifi card and this is what I get:

hub.c: new USB device 00:10.2-1, assigned address 3
prism2sta_probe_usb: prism2_usb: hfa384x_corereset() failed.
usb.c: USB device 3 (vend/prod 0x50c2/0x4013) is not claimed by any active driver.

I think the problem is here: hfa384x_corereset() failed
the device is not claimed by the driver....

Any ideas??
Thanks!

T.J.
Averatec 3150p

So, anyone have any tips/ideas? If you can help, we'll have another MS convert to linux :-)

_________________
I wish hell would freeze over already. :-(

EDIT: w00t, it has!

hjlane3 · Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 7:34 am Post subject:

Ok a little bit of an update. I've been tinkering around all day with this.....

creese · n00b Joined: 13 Aug 2003 Posts: 58 Location: Folsom, CA

I'm currently using the 0.2.1-pre9 drivers on my Averatec 3150p. It's been a while since I set it up, but I seem to remember that the newest drivers (at the time) didn't work. I had to manually add the device id to the driver.

xadhatter · n00b Joined: 20 Sep 2003 Posts: 5

How do you manually add the device id to the driver?

creese · n00b Joined: 13 Aug 2003 Posts: 58 Location: Folsom, CA

In the file prism2sta.c there is a table beginning with:

static struct usb_device_id usb_prism_tbl[]

This table contains all the USB vendor and device codes the driver will recognize. You'll need to add the Averatec numbers to this table. These are the numbers you see when you get the device unknown message from the usb sub system.

usb.c: USB device 3 (vend/prod 0x50c2/0x4013) is not claimed by any active driver.

When it works you should get:
usb.c: registered new driver prism2_usb
hub.c: new USB device 00:10.2-1, assigned address 4

ifconfig -a then shows a wlan0 device

I'd offer to send you my modifications, but I seem to have lost them.

creese · n00b Joined: 13 Aug 2003 Posts: 58 Location: Folsom, CA

Forgot a link:

http://www.averatecforums.com/

Has lots of good info

xadhatter · n00b Joined: 20 Sep 2003 Posts: 5

wow! it works! so happy!!!!

rbeagle · n00b Joined: 22 Jul 2002 Posts: 12 Location: Texas

I have a different laptop, but it also uses the AirVast Taiwan adapter that hjlane3 has. I followed the instructions and added the device id to the driver, and the driver compiled and loads without error. But it still doesn't create the wlan0 interface. The output of dmesg shows:

Kuhndog86 · Posted: Tue Oct 05, 2004 2:59 pm Post subject: Re: wow

msa · Posted: Sun Oct 10, 2004 7:59 pm Post subject: kernel?

Would it be a good idea to use the 2.4 kernel instead of the 2.6 kernel? The problem is, that I have the same WLAN card:

IEEE 802.11b PRISM3 USB

It wont work. Should I compile a 2.4 kernel instead of a 2.6 kernel?