DWL-520 802.11b Adapter Problems

krital · n00b Joined: 27 Aug 2003 Posts: 4 Location: Washington, DC

I recently bought a laptop and, after careful research into the area, I decided on buying a DLink 520 wifi card. Unfortunately, although this card is recognized and works swimmingly under Windows XP on the same box, the same can't be said for linux -- the kernel completely refuses to recognize it, using the Hermes kernel drivers, the hostAP drivers, or linux-wlan drivers.
I was wondering if anyone else has had success in getting the card to work and what, if anything, I'm doing wrong. The card's not listed in lspci, and when I try to modprobe any drivers, I get this:

laser root # modprobe prism2_pci
/lib/modules/2.4.22/net/prism2_pci.o: init_module: No such device
Hint: insmod errors can be caused by incorrect module parameters, including invalid IO or IRQ parameters.
You may find more information in syslog or the output from dmesg
/lib/modules/2.4.22/net/prism2_pci.o: insmod /lib/modules/2.4.22/net/prism2_pci.o failed
/lib/modules/2.4.22/net/prism2_pci.o: insmod prism2_pci failed

laser root # dmesg -c
prism2_init: prism2_pci.o: 0.2.1-pre9 Loaded
prism2_init: dev_info is: prism2_pci
prism2_init: prism2_pci: No devices found, driver not installed.
p80211.o: 0.2.1-pre9 Unloaded

Information on the system:
Athlon XP 1900+
Kernel v2.4.22
DLink 520 revision B

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

m0pr0be · Guru Joined: 29 Aug 2002 Posts: 308

search the forums.

there are a LOT of threads concerning the dwl cards. both the prism based and the ti-based models.

grant.mcdorman · Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2003 8:24 pm Post subject: DWL-520 v.s. DWL-520+

Watch out. The product names are confusing; DWL-520+ is not the same as DWL-520 (the 520+ is a TI ACX 100 based card). However, I have a DWL-520+ and it's working fine for me with the acx100 drivers [ax100.sourceforge.net].

You can check by running lspci. If you get

krital · n00b Joined: 27 Aug 2003 Posts: 4 Location: Washington, DC

Hrm, time for some closure. Turns out that the card that I had was actually the DLink 520 Revision D, which doesn't use the hermes chipset. Instead, it uses some chipset that's also used by a Realtek card, which is, in all actuality, absolutely terrible. The realtek card drivers _will_ recognize the card, after some finagling, but that's about as far as they can go. They interface rather poorly with existing wireless configuration utilities, and I wasn't able to get any further in my endeavor to turn my desktop into an access point than before. Whenever I load the driver, for example, my kernel irqd starts consuming 100% of the CPU for no apparent reason. This realtek driver is closed source and poorly programmed; don't expect to get things working readily with it.

I have to say that I'm _very_ annoyed with DLink for changing chipsets in these cards without even marking this on the box. I was led to believe that revisions A and B work without a problem, being prism2 based, but revision D is not.

grant.mcdorman · Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2003 11:52 pm Post subject:

UberLord · Posted: Sat Nov 29, 2003 12:14 am Post subject: