3Com 3CRWE62092A Wireless LAN PC card on Dell Latitude C400

mattt · n00b Joined: 06 Jan 2003 Posts: 1 Location: London

I first built and installed the pcmcia_cs package. I didn't do a plain
emerge as the source was needed later to compile the card driver.

ebuild /usr/portage/sys-apps/pcmcia-cs/pcmcia-cs-3.2.3-r1.ebuild fetch unpack compile install qmerge

This driver for this particular 3Com card is the same as the No Wire
Needed driver and the Swallow 550 & 1100 driver. It has good support
for the card security features. Get it from

http://www.xs4all.nl/~bvermeul/swallow/poldhu-0.2.13.tar.gz

and untar into /usr/src.

Run make config, make all and make install. make all complained
about not being able to find the pcmcia sources. This was apparently important to
fix, I entered the path to source of the pcmcia-cs ebuild

(/var/tmp/portage/pcmcia-cs-3.2.3-r1/work/pcmcia-cs-3.2.3/) after the
message (the prompt for doing so isn't very clear here).

make install installed the drivers into
/lib/modules/{kern-version}/pcmcia along with the others that were
built by the pcmcia_cs package.

Next, appended the card definitions found in poldhu/config/poldhu.conf
to the /etc/pcmcia/config.opts file.

This:

modprobe pcmcia_core
modprobe i82365
modprobe ds
modprobe poldhu_cs

didn't work. I found problems getting the poldhu_cs driver to load, it kept
bombing out stating a 'Card Services version mismatch'. This proved to
be a pain, especially after not having any luck looking on google. You
may not have the same problem, it was probably just the way I ended up
building it (as this write up does not reflect the actual path I
followed by any means). To get round this issue i just edited
poldhu/clients/poldhu_cs.c and commented out lines 2750-2755 which
were responsible for the particular error I was getting. After
recompiling the driver it loaded just fine.

The other issue I found was that my /usr/include/linux/wireless.h was
well out of date, v12 of Wireless Extensions when the latest is
currently v16. My solution, after much reading around on Jean
Tourrilhes site:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html
and elsewhere, was to download and build v26-pre7 of
wireless-tools. wireless-tools complain during build and iwconfig
complains during when the package has been compiled with an old
wireless.h. The wireless-tools tar comes with all versions of
wireless.h since v9 and it is just a matter of copying the latest one
to /usr/include/linux to get everything to compile ok.

I must admit to having trouble getting gkrellm-wireless to work, I
suspect that /proc/net/wireless is not working correctly and this
probably has something to do with my hackery of wireless.h.

The last step was to configure /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts. I had to
comment out lines 45 and 46. I added in the card's first three hex
digits of it's MAC address, ESSID and KEY to the last case at the
bottom of the script.

I was then able to run /etc/init.d/pcmcia start. By checking
/var/run/stab I could see that the card had been detected.

Once the card was working I was able to give the card interface an ip
address and add a default gateway.

This was my first try at getting wireless working under linux and the
3Com card itself was a bit unique; so any comments greatly appreciated.

Spida · Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2003 3:04 pm Post subject:

I have got this card, too and have similar, if not the same problems. Commenting out lines 2750-2755 of /poldhu/clients/poldhu.c fixed the "Card Services version mismatch"-Problem. Thanks for that hint.

I didn't do the wireless-tools-part of your list, and I am still using pcmcia-cs-3.2.1-r3.
The Problems I have is that I have no clue how to configure the card, everything it takes from the wireless.opts file seems to be the ESSID, but neither the AP-Address, nor the channel, ...
Sometimes the iwconfig utility reports the transmit-power of the card set to 0dBm, sometimes it reports 14 dBm.
/proc/net/wireless gives me some kind of header from an empty table, I believe that this should not be empty, but I have *NO* experiences with wlan.

How should I go on?
Update pcmcia-cs to 3.2.3?
Update wireless-tools?

Spida · Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2003 6:27 pm Post subject:

Ok, I updated pcmcia-cs to 3.2.3, and installed wireless-tools-26.pre7
Now I can select a channel, and have a TX-Power > 0.
The card seems to work, but I can't connect to the AP (at least I can't ping it, or anything beyond in wired net).
As I am a total Wlan newbie, can anybody tell me where I should start looking for my mistakes?

Spida · Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 4:56 pm Post subject:

The Accesspoint is working fine, I have just tested it with another notebook.
Now either my driver is not working, or my configuration is borked.
Can anybody help me to find out how to get this working?

dirtboy · Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 6:44 pm Post subject:

I have that same card and updated the firmware from Windows to the latest version. I am having great headaches with it too. Try this command and see if you get the same error I do:

iwconfig eth1 ap any

That is supposed to setup the access point to be any found, but mine keeps saying "Operation not permitted".

Spida · Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 10:50 pm Post subject:

iwconfig eth0 ap any gets me:
Error for wireless request "Set AP Address" (8B14) :
SET failed for eth0: Operation not supported

Where did you get the firmware-update, did it help?

dirtboy · Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2003 4:30 am Post subject:

Spida · Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2003 5:13 pm Post subject:

I updated my card just this morning. no change.

sancho5 · n00b Joined: 04 Nov 2003 Posts: 28

I was able to successfully load support for this card using the instructions provided in this thread. I documented the process in this HOWTO I wrote, hoping that it might be of help to someone.

You can find the HOWTO here: http://www.sancho2k.net/filemgmt/singlefile.php?lid=34

DS