Lucent Orinoco Silver - can't get it to work on slackware linux

[Andrey Beletsky]

hello.

i'm in trouble with lucent orinoco PC24E silver card on a desktop
system (through Ricoh RL5c475-based PCI card).

the specs are:

linux slackware 8.0 on a Duron-800/Soltek 75KAV (VIA KT133)/160M RAM
kernel 2.4.19 (previously i've tried 2.4.18 with no luck, also i've
tried to install an "old" 2.2.21 kernel and use wvlan_cs with it,
which produced a very similar sort of error, so i guess the problem is
not with kernel)
pcmcia-cs 3.2.1
wireless-tools 0.25
drivers: orinoco_cs, wavelan2_cs - tried both of them, no effect.

and the problem is:

the card properly initialises at system bootup (it gives me two short
beeps), it even displays correctly in iwconfig output...

eth3      IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"DOESNTMATTER"  Nickname:"coffee"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.422GHz  Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
          Bit Rate:11Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   Sensitivity:1/3
          Retry limit:4   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off

...but, as you can see, it fails to find an access point.
when i'm trying to manually assign an ip address to it, using
ifconfig, the system just hangs completely until i remove PCMCIA card from PCI adapter.

recently i've noticed a strange thing: lsmod says orinoco_cs is being
unused:

Module                  Size  Used by
orinoco_cs              4896   0  (unused)
orinoco                29072   0  [orinoco_cs]
hermes                  5344   0  [orinoco_cs orinoco]
8139too                13968   1
mii                     1136   0  [8139too]
ds                      6704   1  [orinoco_cs]
i82365                 21616   1
pcmcia_core            36288   0  [orinoco_cs ds i82365]
ne2k-pci                5088   2
8390                    5984   0  [ne2k-pci]
ppp_deflate            40128   0  (unused)
ppp_generic            15936   0  [ppp_deflate]
slhc                    4672   0  [ppp_generic]

i guess that isn't normal.

i've tried to use this card on a laptop with windows 95 installed on it
-- works just well. so the problem is neither with hardware, at least,
not with PCMCIA card.

well, i have no idea. do you?

thanks in advance.