Guest jhp Posted January 15, 2006 Report Share Posted January 15, 2006 Hi Everyone, I've recently had to admit defeat with my Belkin RT2570 USB dongle for wireless access. After battling on with it for months and putting it down to the drivers, I have now realised that it also refuses to work half the time using the official windows drivers on xp, so I think I'll have to retire it because I'm tired of disappointment. It could be my laptop (an old Vaio), as I have previously had it running, and in fact wrote the howto here for anyone struggling: http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index....10_rt2570_Howto My post here is regarding a quality PCMCIA wireless card which will preferably be supported by linux straight out of the box, and also support WPA without any problems (whether using wpa supplicant or without- I'm not bothered so long as it comes up when I ask it to!) So- anyone have any recommendations they care to share? 11b or 54g whatever. A reliable connection is more important to me than speed atm, although I would prefer a non-NDIS story if you have one. :P Cheers John Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arne Posted January 16, 2006 Report Share Posted January 16, 2006 Hello jhp, If you llok at Mandriva hardware compability list You will find wireless nic certified by mdv for 2006.0 I can not determine if it is pcmcia card because it's not mentioned in the list. Hope it helps Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest jhp Posted January 16, 2006 Report Share Posted January 16, 2006 hi arne, thanks for replying. yes i've been reading through various lists of what is and what isn't compatible, i just wondered if anyone cared to offer up any information on success stories as mileage seems to vary between chipsets / card manufacturers. i've borrowed a netgear wg511 which i'll hopefully get chance to test this evening, apparently you can use the prism54 drivers (http://prism54.org/) with this as its a taiwanese model, so we'll see what happens there! jhp Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 16, 2006 Report Share Posted January 16, 2006 I got my wireless working in 2006. My wireless card is based on Atheros chipsets, and therefore the only options available to me are madwifi or ndiswrapper. Had no success whatsoever with madwifi. Every time you try to bring the interface up it always wants to use the wrong settings. I can manually then bump it, but wpa_supplicant wouldn't work correctly to give access anyway. In the end, I got it working a treat with ndiswrapper and wpa_supplicant. Of course, you'd prefer not to use this, so if the chipset is Atheros based, then stay away unless you don't mind using ndiswrapper. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arne Posted January 16, 2006 Report Share Posted January 16, 2006 jhp, Strange since I am looking for the same as you and would like to avoid ndiswrapper just as you. I found the netgear WG511 v2 in a shop today and I am wondering if anybody get it to work. There must be since the compability means someone has made it to work. I have just got 1 MB ADSL and use Aztech router (DSL305EU). I am in process of buying a SWITCH and a Wireless LAN access point and a pcmcia wireless LAN card for my notebook.. Lets hope someone are coming forward with their experience. I will follow future replies with interest. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest jhp Posted January 16, 2006 Report Share Posted January 16, 2006 ian- thanks for the heads up. its not that i've got anything against the ndiswrapper as its obviously a sound concept, i'd just sooner not use it if i have the option. :D arne- i found this guide earlier today which will be my guide for installing the prism drivers on mandriva- http://prism54.org/punbb/viewtopic.php?pid=2431 hopefully i'll have more to report later in the week. i have discovered though that you really should be aiming for the wg511s which are made in taiwan, from googling about they seem to be less problemmatic to install. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 16, 2006 Report Share Posted January 16, 2006 Same for me :P Would have rather used madwifi myself, but my choice was limited! :o Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arne Posted January 17, 2006 Report Share Posted January 17, 2006 jhp That was a beutifull HOWTO. Thanks fir the tip. This quote from google is not very inspiring. From: "Charles E. \"Rick\" Taylor, IV" <tomalek mindspring com> To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list redhat com> Subject: Re: netgear wireless wg511 Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 20:54:25 -0400 On Mon, 2005-06-27 at 07:44 +0800, John Summerfied wrote: > A note to others: if you're buying a card to work with Linux, this isn't > a good choice. ndiswrapper will drive the Marvell-based cards under FC3 (haven't tried FC4 - took the card back and got a better one) with some caveats. Mainly, you had better be near your AP when inserting the card, otherwise the card goes a little crazy. These cards say "v2" on the top of the card. I think I will look for another card since this card "v2" using the Marvel chip. My problem is there isn't much to choose from here where I live I look forward to your progress. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 17, 2006 Report Share Posted January 17, 2006 I've had problems with wired network cards with Marvell/Yukon chipsets. It got picked up with Mandriva, but not with Gentoo. I've also heard other people unable to get Marvell based chipsets working with Mandriva. I'm unsure of what model card. Just something to bear in mind. If it doesn't work, best to return it to the shop. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest jhp Posted January 17, 2006 Report Share Posted January 17, 2006 well i had a go at it last night, but unfortunately only had the card on loan for the evening and it was a no go for an easy setup. the howto i found is totally out of date (i realised that the mandriva release mentioned was an old one but the layout of the driver files seems to have totally changed since then also). after trying to navigate around the prism54 (the wiki doesn't seem to work too well and there's a severe shortage of help) i gave up on the linux side- but just out of interest thought i'd try the ndis driver. unfortunately, the driver on the cd (and one i downloaded from netgear) both need to run a setup program from a windows client, there are no plain driver .ini files there! why on earth can't they write a linux driver to accompany their products?? so in summary the netgear has a linux driver which is claimed to work but poorly documented and windows drivers which require a proprietary setup program. well at least it didn't cost anything (apart from an hour or two) :P think i'll see what other cards present an option... i'm sure there must be some old 11b cards which offer native wpa support. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted January 17, 2006 Report Share Posted January 17, 2006 Just out of interest, if you do get to borrow it again. The setup.exe might extract the files to a directory, which you could then copy away and use for ndiswrapper. If no Windows, use "wine setup.exe" and it'll run the installation at least, although probably fails obviously because of wine not being a full blown Windows. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest jhp Posted January 18, 2006 Report Share Posted January 18, 2006 yep i had toyed with the idea of doing that but seems a bit of an object defeater. however, i had a breakthrough with the belkin usb adapter i previously used on another machine. updated my kernel to the latest, installed the latest beta drivers, changed the init.d/network script call my iwconfig statements for wpa info and ping! comes up straight away, up to now haven't had any lockups so hopefully should be sorted. i had wondered why my laptop was freezing, and it seems to have been the ehci service on startup, not the driver or dongle. it even held a connection while my partner was using her wireless laptop simultaneously - used to kick me off on windoze when that happened. safari sagoody. arne - i believe belkin do a pcmcia card based on the 2x00 chipset, so it may be worth going down that route? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arne Posted January 19, 2006 Report Share Posted January 19, 2006 (edited) jhp, Thank's for the tip. I will investigate it. So far I found the Belkin F5D6020 version 1 is based on 2x00 chipset and version 2 is based on the atml chipset. The atml version is a lot of work for a newbie like me. Edited January 19, 2006 by Arne Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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