HowTo - Orinoco Gold Classic with 2.6.2

xcable · Last edited by xcable on Tue Feb 10, 2004 2:37 pm; edited 3 times in total

Orinoco Gold Classic with 2.6.2 How-to

Here is how to get your Orinoco Gold Classic working with a 2.6.2 kernel. You can get this card from Buy.com http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10348445&sp=1&loc=101. From what I have read this the best wifi card for Linux 2nd only to Cisco cards (which are expensive).

This card is either made by Orinoco Wireless Networks, Proxim, Lucent Technologies, or Agere Systems; looks like this company/group has been purchased many times by different companies. The chipset is Intersil PRISM2.

The power LED on the card will NOT light up until the system gets an IP from this device (dhcpce eth1).

1) Compile kernel 2.6.x (tested with 2.6.2-gentoo) with PCMCIA support, makeing yenta a module

gwlinden · Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 10:56 am Post subject:

I have a LinkSys WPC-11, which has a Prism2 as well.

When I moved to 2.6.x, I had to drop linux-wlan-ng, and use the kernel support for both PCMCIA, and the hermes wireless driver (as modules). Then I reinstalled pcmcia-cs, configured wireless, and that worked.

I have tried getting linux-wlan-ng to work, but failed also...
_________________
Gwendolyn

xcable · Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 7:23 pm Post subject:

Did you only include the hermes driver as a module, nothing else (like orinoco_cs or orinoco)?

Do you set up /etc/modules.autoload/kernel-2.6 to autoload the module?

I have a Orinoco Gold Classic PCMCIA card, and I can't get it to work with 2.6 (the power led on the card does not even move on). I does work the 2.4 (tested with Knoppix).

When I compile (ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge pcmcia-cs) and install (rc-update add pcmcia boot) pcmcia-cs it complains that there is no "prism2_cs".

echo6 · Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2003 Posts: 587

I have a Dell Truemobile, orinoco based card, and Sitecom cards, based on Prism2/ZCOM working fine in 2.6.2.

I use the kernel drivers, you still need David Hinds' pcmcia-cs for the cardctl and cardmgr utils.

I don't bother with modules.autoload, I just modprobe yenta_socket then execute cardmgr which picks up the card and loads the correct modules, i.e. orinoco_cs, orinoco and hermes.
My kernel config is as follows;

raylpc · Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2004 4:20 am Post subject:

I have a PLANEX prism2 card. I managed to get the latest linux-wlan-ng to work with 2.6 (with FEATURE=-sandbox), but it's very unstable. It crashed my system completely after some use, and I had to do a hard shutdown.
So now I will try to use orinoco. But I couldn't find its documentation. Can someone point me to its site or a guide? Thanks.