Fedora Core 2 T2 and prism wifi card

[neit]

Alright, lets get started with the facts:

Running on an averated 3150 series laptop
Windows XP Home
Fedora Core 2 Test 2 --> updated to kernel 2.6.5

Netgear wg511 wireless card


The problem is I can't seem to get this card to work under Fedora. I have never had this working properly before when i ran fedora core 1 (didn't want to patch the kernel) so when fc2 came out, i updated it to kernel 2.6.5, which has prism54 already in it.

Now i've spent a fair amount of time on the #wireless and #prism54 channels on freenode, but to no avail. I believe it has something to do with fedora'a nonstandard way of using configuration tools. I tried adding it, but my model is not listed under possible hardware.

I downloaded the firmware from the prism54 website and its living at /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/isl3890.

I'm hoping that someone else has done this successfully and can just tell me the 3 or 4 steps they had to do in order to get it to work. The modules all seem to be there, its just getting the firmware loaded and working thats the problem.

Please help =)

 

[drag]

wow, prism is in kernel 2.6.5? That's cool.

The firmware is propriatory and probably needs to be downloaded and installed seperately, that sort of thing is hard to distribute in free distubutions because of the legal issues. Also make sure that you have the "hotplug" stuff installed. If you compiled your own kernel make sure that you have hotplug firmware stuff enabled.

get firmware image here
skip down to the firmware section of this readme and see if that makes any sense to you

To bad I recently busted my prism54-based card, otherwise I could go thru the steps and write it down for you, but I forget how to do this stuff fairly quickly. Oh well I will get a new one sometime this week, maybe.

make sure that you have this file "firmware.agent" in your /etc/hotplug directory

That tells hotplug what to do to find and load the firmware. It's default path according to the file is /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware

you should be able to just go:
modprobe prism54
(if prism54 is the correct name for the module)
and then check the kernel message output. You can do that with the "dmesg" command. And it will probably mentioned that it loaded the firmware image or something.

The wireless command line commands will be like this(this is what I used to connect my laptop to my desktop, which I set up as a wireless bridge to the rest of my network (in otherwords "wireless access point". I realy don't know all that much about wireless stuff, I never seen a real wireless access point or used any wireless stuff before, but this worked:



iwconfig eth0 essid Darth mode Managed channel 1 enc s:tacobell commit
ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.30 up
route add default gw 192.168.1.254

for iwconfig is the command line stuff to control wireless extension part in the card. Ifconfig is the normal ethernet command stuff.

for the "mode" in iwconfig you have different types. You have "Master", which is basicly used for creating a wireless access point. "Managed" is for creating a client to connect to a WAP. "Ad-hoc" is for peer to peer stuff. Not every card supports all the modes.

You should have some gui configuration tools for fedora avaible to you to make this a bit easier. Once you get the module loaded you should be able to configure your card thru those tools.

hope that helps

 

[neit]

no dice, i'm getting an error in dmesg that says i couldn't load firmware =(

I put a message up on th prism54 forums with more info, so i'm gonna point anyone that has a sliver of knowledge there and hope i get a response =)

http://prism54.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=606

Please check it out and if you can help me with any tips, i appreciate it.