Getting Belkin FD56020 to work on my laptop

Stu L Tissimus

First of all, it's not a generic WLAN card with a Prism or PrismII chipset, it uses a modified version of Prism/PrismII , called the Atmel chipset. I've downloaded the Atmel drivers at http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net , but it still doesn't work. Are there any apps I must emerge off Portage to enable the Atmel chipset? (BTW, I have enabled non-ham radio in my kernel, it's gentoo-sources 2.4.20-r6)
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bennerstul · n00b Joined: 30 Aug 2003 Posts: 23

I too am stuck on this, atmelwlan drivers wouldn't compile, or when they did, they didn't recognize my card. Spent a week on this a while back, went through every post here even remotely connected, googled till I couldn't google anymore. Knoppix finds and uses it just great, and it loads the module 'pcmf502re', which is supposedly in the atmelwlan package. I have given up for now, but would really like to get this last part of my laptop puzzle into place.

krazo · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Oct 2002 Posts: 90

In what way does it not work? Does the card get recognized when you insert it?
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bennerstul · n00b Joined: 30 Aug 2003 Posts: 23

The lights light up, and stay solidly lit. iwconfig reports no devices with wireless extensions. I cannot bring up the interface with ifconfig. The modules I have tried (kernel2.6test4 atmel drivers) modprobe fine but have no noticable effect (atmel_cs and atmel).

cardctl ident shows the correct card (Belkin 11Mbps-Wireless bla bla), but still iwconfig shows no devices.

Questions: Are there other ways of querying pcmcia devices than cardctl?
Is there some way to copy the config Knoppix (detects the Belkin card beautifully, something the gentoo livecd did not do) produces for my system and integrate parts of it with my existing config? I have spent nearly a week trying to get the wierd ESS1869 audiodrive isa board in this laptop working (which I finally did! My biggest breakthrough yet!) so I am exteremely unwilling to lose my current setup.

I am newish to gentoo (10 installs or so) and newish to linux also (2 years). I may therefore be missing some crucial commands or tools that would make my life easier, feel free to mention any of those

PS: Compaq Armada 3500 for searchers...

krazo · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Oct 2002 Posts: 90

I have posted a mini howto here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=32357&start=25

You need to add lines into your pcmcia config to make it load up atmel_cs when the card is inserted as modprobe'ing does not seem to detect it...

Knoppix uses a 2.4 kernel and the 2.4 drivers are different from 2.6 (in a better way). Good luck!
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bennerstul · n00b Joined: 30 Aug 2003 Posts: 23

Thanks for the tips krazo, but trust me I had alreasy seen your post and tried it a few times...

When I use the atmel_fwl it responds to all the different bins as "this is not an atmel device". I have added lines in /etc/pcmcia/config to add the belkin card.

I would go back to 2.4 tomorrow if I knew I could get all the other devices working again, and if it would only compile faster! I'm on an old 300mhz laptop so compile time is an issue, and 2.6 seems smarter in what it chooses to compile/recompile.

swingarm · Posted: Sun Sep 07, 2003 8:36 am Post subject:

I'm getting also getting the same error although it's a Gigafast WF-721-AEX PCMCIA card which according to this website does have a Amtel chipset. I was also wondering exactly what file under '/etc/pcmcia' do I modify and what do insert into the file?

After working on this for four days I'm beginning to wonder if it wouldn't be better to just get a different PCMCIA wireless card.

jkalderash · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Jul 2003 Posts: 111

I got the "this is not an atmel device" only when I hadn't loaded the firmware, I believe. Is the card recognized at all in dmesg? By the way, you can directly modify /etc/pcmcia/config or any of the *.conf files, but they suggest adding things to config.opts. It's all just read into the config file in the end.

By the way, I finally got atmelwlandriver to compile for 2.6 yesterday, so I'm going to go to the library and try it out. That is, if I can get pcmcia-cs to recompile... plus I had to downgrade to test3 because I didn't feel like bothering with scsi inconcsistencies...

krazo · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Oct 2002 Posts: 90

In fact, I'm about to get a new one myself. I really dislike the fact that iwconfig doesn't work properly on this card (it doesn't support many of the extensions forcing me to use their GUI). I recommend the SMC 2632W (Prism II) I had it for a few days it worked with 0 problems.
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bennerstul · n00b Joined: 30 Aug 2003 Posts: 23

prism chipset does seem the way to go, I may try my linksys wireless USB setup - stayed away from that as I figured USB would be harder to configure than PCMCIA... I am also compiling a special 2.4 kernel just for the atmel chip, will boot into that when I absolutely need to for now.

jkalderash · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Jul 2003 Posts: 111

No luck with the atmelwlandriver - I'm getting this in /var/log/syslog:

krazo · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Oct 2002 Posts: 90

You need the rmfd rev e for sure, thats the one that gets used. You can skip the 3Com and minipci. On a side note, I don't use kernel pcmcia, I use the one that is shipped with pcmcia-cs.
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swingarm · Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2003 5:34 am Post subject:

After 5 days I've had enough of the Amtek and ADMtek PCMCIA chipsets, I just purchased a Compaq(re-branded Linksys) Wireless Card with a PrismII Chipset off of Ebay. I really like this 2.6 kernel and I'll die trying to getting it to work.