Orinoco Silver cards and Linux 2.2 ?

[Simon Byrnand]

Hi Everyone,

I'm using a custom bootdisk I made from scratch a while ago in the role of
an ethernet to wireless router. (Actually I have several routers running it)

It's based on a Linux 2.2.19 kernel, busybox, and has basic networking
tools like ifconfig, route, a small telnetd, etc. I use it as a nice
simple, remotely administerable wireless router.

At the moment I'm using the wavelan2_cs driver downloaded from the orinoco
site, together with the pcmcia 3.1.26 package, compiled for 2.2.19 as
mentioned. I'm using ISA-PCMCIA cards based on the Vadem VG-469 (uses
i82365.o) with both Orinoco Silver cards, and a couple of old Bronze cards.

In a couple of previous firmware versions for the Orinoco cards (I forget
which exactly) there was an incompatibility between the wavelan2_cs driver
and the Bronze cards which would cause them to fail to initialize 90% of
the time, which forced me to use the wvlan_cs driver for bronze cards. In
the most recent firmware and wavelan2_cs driver this seems to be fixed
however, and I'm not having any problems.

My main query is that at the moment I have no way of doing any kind of
signal testing from my wireless bootdisk as I don't currently have the
wireless tools (iwconfig etc) on it. I then discovered that the wavelan2_cs
driver doesn't seem to support the wireless extensions needed to be queried
by those tools anyway, when I tried to use them.

The question is, what different drivers are there available for orinoco
silver cards, and which should I be using ? It seems like the 'orinoco.o'
driver is getting a lot of development and supports the wireless
extensions, but from what I can see this is a 2.4 driver with no 2.2
backport ?

I seriously doubt that I could squeeze a 2.4 kernel (even stripped down a
lot) and wireless tools on my existing boot disk as my 2.2 kernel is
already stripped down and compressed, and space is tight. What are my other
options ?

Could somebody in the know summarize the situation regarding the various
drivers that will work with orinoco silver cards, which support what kernel
series, which have wireless extensions, and so forth ? The current
situation seems to be a minefield of ifs buts and maybes :)

I'm also wondering if anybody had any experience with any of the PCI-PCMCIA
adaptor cards commonly sold with/for wavelan cards and what drivers are
needed for them, as compared to the ISA-PCMCIA cards which I have now.
(Which no longer seem to be easily obtainable)

Regards,
Simon