Netgear MA401 Wireless PCMCIA adapter

[Guest severian]

Hello, Everyone,

I bought a Netgear MA401 PCMCIA card for my HP Omnibook 6000 laptop. Mandrake 8.2 and 9 work wonderfully with everything on my PC except this card. I am new to Linux, but I am a quick study...I searched on the net for help, trying Prism2 and the Netgear Redhat drivers, but I'm not entirely sure I was following the procedures correctly. If there is anyone who has gotten this card to work, I would LOVE to hear from you!

 

Additionally, this card works fine with Windows 2000...I'm new to wireless and not sure if I can use another manufacturer's card with the Netgear router...if I can, then I don't have a problem returning this card for one that works with Mandrake..

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Dave

[Guest severian]

After much downloading, compiling and fiddling about, I found the way to get this card to work. I downloaded the latest pcmcia-cc from sourceforge, the version being pcmcia-cs-3.2.3, compiled and installed it.

In the /etc/pcmcia directory, I created a file called "netgear.conf". In this file, I typed the following:

card "Intersil PRISM2 11 Mbps Wireless Adapter"

manfid 0x000b, 0x7300

bind "orinoco_cs"

The card actually works now.

 

I should add that through a week of screwing around with this, that I installed Red Hat 8 along with the drivers from Netgear, and it worked fine, but Red Hat 8 is SUCH a dog and full of bloat-ware, that I decided against keeping it and went BACK to Mandrake Linux 9.

RedHat has a pretty interface, but my HP Omnibook 6000's cdrom was acting strangely with it, and I preferred the stability I'd seen in Mandrake.