Unmaintained! I don't use either of these cards anymore, so I'm not sure if this information is still correct.
Update: I've since successfully used these cards on the following kernels:
I recently bought a pair of wireless network cards--a PCI Netgear MA311, and a PCMCIA Linksys WPC11 version 3. Setting up a wireless link between my Linux desktop and laptop wasn't too difficult (once I realised the PCI card wasn't quite seated properly..), but I thought I'd record the steps I took for anyone else trying to configure these cards.
Both cards are based on the PRISM chipset, which is supported by both the linux-wlan and orinoco drivers. I played with both but ultimately ended up using the orinoco drivers on both machines.
The orinoco drivers shipped with kernel 2.6.0-test8 are version 0.13e. Previously I was running kernel 2.4.20 (which uses an earlier version of the orinoco drivers), but I found that the wireless connection would freeze up with "Error -110 writing Tx descriptor to BAP" messages after a few minutes. Upgrading both machines to kernel 2.6 seems to have fixed this problem.
The following packages were installed on each machine:
The orinoco drivers are shipped with the Linux kernel, so installation is just a matter of configuring the kernel to build the correct modules. I enabled the following in my kernel configuration:
Under Device Drivers -> Networking support -> Wireless LAN (non-hamradio) [*] Wireless LAN drivers (non-hamradio) & Wireless Extensions --- Wireless 802.11b ISA/PCI cards support <M> Hermes chipset 802.11b support (Orinoco/Prism2/Symbol) <M> Hermes in PLX9052 based PCI adaptor support (Netgear MA301 etc.) (EXPERIMENTAL) <M> Hermes in TMD7160 based PCI adaptor support (EXPERIMENTAL) <M> Prism 2.5 PCI 802.11b adaptor support (EXPERIMENTAL)
After building the kernel and modules, you should have:
To configure and bring up the network interface, I use the following commands:
modprobe orinoco_pci iwconfig eth1 mode ad-hoc nick "" essid "mark" channel 6 ifconfig eth1 192.168.2.1 ifconfig eth1 up
The output from iwconfig (part of wireless-tools) is:
eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"mark" Mode:Ad-Hoc Frequency:2.437GHz Cell: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX Bit Rate:11Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3 Retry min limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0 Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
(Link quality is zero. That's strange, but it works anyway...)
And the output from ifconfig:
eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX inet addr:192.168.2.1 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:78 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:123 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:100 RX bytes:5376 (5.2 KiB) TX bytes:19965 (19.4 KiB) Interrupt:5 Base address:0xc000 Memory:dddff000-dddfffff
The setup for this card is much the same as the MA311 setup. I selected the following kernel options:
Under Device Drivers -> Networking support -> Wireless LAN (non-hamradio) [*] Wireless LAN (non-hamradio) & Wireless Extensions --- Wireless 802.11b Pcmcia/Cardbus cards support <M> Hermes chipset 802.11b support (Orinoco/Prism2/Symbol) <M> Hermes in PLX9052 based PCI adaptor support (Netgear MA301 etc.) <M> Prism 2.5 PCI 802.11b adaptor support --- Wireless Pcmcia cards support <M> Hermes PCMCIA card support Under Device Drivers -> Networking support -> PCMCIA network device support [*] PCMCIA network device support
To bring up the interface, I run the following:
modprobe orinoco_cs iwconfig eth0 mode ad-hoc nick "" essid "mark" channel 6 ifconfig eth0 192.168.2.2 route add default gw 192.168.2.1 ifconfig eth0 up
Output from iwconfig is:
eth0 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"mark" Mode:Ad-Hoc Frequency:2.437GHz Cell: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX Bit Rate:11Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3 Retry min limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0 Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:18 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
And ifconfig..
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX inet addr:192.168.2.2 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:1231 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:1067 errors:9 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:100 RX bytes:230396 (224.9 KiB) TX bytes:166411 (162.5 KiB) Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100
This done, each box is able to ping the other.