PCMCIA Wireless Card

LordKefka · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 30 May 2004 Posts: 86

I've been trying to get my Netgear WG511 working for about a month now. The problem is, there's tons of posts about wireless cards on these forums, but they seem to leave things out, contradict each other, and I'm still the same place I was a month ago! I still have no idea of what I'm doing, and it's starting to look like I'm not going to find any answers browsing the forums, since i seem to be missing a few steps.

Can someone kindly tell me how to get this card working, and assume I haven't done a single pre-requisite (which is probably not far off :p). Just start from the beginning, which is perhaps what PCMCIA, hotplug, networking, or any other options I have to enable or modularize in the kernel.

I'm using gentoo-dev-sources 2.6.7, on a Compaq R3140us, amd64 arch. The card is a Netgear WG511 wireless pcmcia card, which I bought solely because of the prism chipset, which hopefully makes setting up less painful...

MHD · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 18 Jun 2003 Posts: 88

I followed this thread:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=177446&highlight=wg511

almost verbatum

Works good for me!

LordKefka · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 30 May 2004 Posts: 86

Nothing seemed to go right for me on that thread. Like, for example, I didn't have a /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware, which leads me to believe there is a step left out where you need to enable something? I dunno, I did everything else in that thread

LordKefka · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 30 May 2004 Posts: 86

Also, I'm not entirely sure If I need pcmcia-cs. I've heard yes'es and no's. My card is not listed on the supported cards list, so I assumed no right away. But then people say they can get it to work anyway? Confusing...

srlinuxx · l33t Joined: 22 Nov 2003 Posts: 627

You don't have to have hotplug, but you do have to have pcmcia-cs tho. You also need serial_cs, ds, pcmcia-core, your specific drivers, and possibly yenta-socket built into your kernel. So, you have to go thru your kernel config really slowly and carefully. Then after install you should get a pcmcia option in your /etc/init.d/ directory - enable it to run at boot. I put the list of modules needed in my /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.4. In fact it's quite a long list to get mine working! This is just an example, substitute your cards modules for mine.
yenta_socket
serial_cs
rtc
crc32
ide-cs
ide-cd
isofs
apm
pcmcia_core
ds
serial_cs
orinoco_cs
hermes
orinoco
3c574_cs
soundcore
sound
zlib_deflate

In fact, I've seen the loading order stop it all from working! So, best advise is just to keep pluggin away at it. Then after all that, you got to set up your /etc/conf.d/net file (and run rc-update) if you want it all done at boot.

hth,
-s
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