Compaq WL200 on Smoothwall (this time in plain text)

[Jim Carter]

On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Tim McAuley wrote:
> I am trying to get a Compaq WL200 running on Smoothwall (2.0 Beta). I need
> some help.
>
> Some information about the set-up and what has been tried so far:
> (I'm not actually at the working machine currently, so forgive me if I can
> provide all error messages)
> - The WL200 is a PCI card but in fact uses the PCMCIA driver (it uses a
> Cirrus Logic PCI-PCMCIA bridge)

Am I correct that this is a PCI card with a little slot in it where you put
in a PCMCIA card?  If so, the relevant driver is orinoco_plx, and you don't
do anything at all with PCMCIA.  But this driver is for the PLX9052
PCI-PCMCIA bridge chip (I've lost track of who the actual chip vendor is),
and I don't see the words "Cirrus Logic" in the sources.  I've taken the
liberty of forwarding this message to the driver's maintainer.

(But I may be speaking from ignorance: maybe the Cirrus Logic card creates
real PCMCIA on a PCI bus.  That's not how the PLX9052 works.)

Anyway, it's worth the effort to build and load that driver and see if it
does anything.  At home I had a Linksys WPC11 PCMCIA card in a WDT11 PCI
bridge (with actual PLX9052), and the PCI support worked fine.  But due to
interoperability problems between Intersil and Lucent-Agere firmware in
Ad-Hoc mode, I spent an outrageous amount of time chasing phantoms, and I
finally junked that setup and bought a cheap access point (managed mode).
If you can't get a Linux driver for your card, you might consider buying a
card that does have drivers.

Another thought: my son bought a Netgear MA401 in MA301 PCI bridge, and it
was dead on arrival.  He returned it (this was at CompUSA in Redmond, WA,
USA), and bought a Siemens Speedsomethingorother 2000 (native PCI card).
It has worked reliably, and it was actually cheaper than the MA401 + MA301.

James F. Carter          Voice 310 825 2897    FAX 310 206 6673
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Email: jimc at math.ucla.edu    http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)