Dell Truemobile 1150 "Ad Hoc Demo Mode" and other things...

[Claudio Lavecchia]

Hello people,

I am getting crazy trying to establish a ad hoc network among my ipaqs 
that use Dell Truemobile 1150 WLAN adapters.
A little bit more background:

I have iPaqs running Familiar Linux v0.7.2. My WLAN adapters are 
associated to wvlan_cs driver.
The problem that I am observing is that when set in ad hoc mode, my 
iPaqs are not associated to the same cell.
After a quick research, I found out that this can depend on the fact 
that the WLAN adapters are in IBSS mode and for some reason this does 
not seem to work.
Searching again, I learned about the existence of the "Ad hoc demo mode" 
that should fix the problem. Running the "iwpriv" command, I see that 
the command "iwpriv get_port3" is not available on my WLAN adapter. Now, 
in Jean Tourrilhes very valuable page 
"http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Linux.Wireless.drivers.802.11b.html" 
I can read, about the driver wvlan_cs.o:

"Modes : Managed, Ad-Hoc and Ad-Hoc-demo"
and
" The MAC support both Managed and *Ad-Hoc modes*. However, the initial 
firmware for those cards did support only a non-compliant Ad-Hoc mode 
(called Ad-Hoc demo mode - which interoperate with most PrismII cards). 
In order to gain WiFi compliance, Lucent added in recent firmware (6.06 
and greater) a second Ad-Hoc mode which is fully 802.11 compliant 
(called Peer to Peer mode or IBSS Ad-Hoc mode - and which interoperate 
with Aironet cards). Of course, the two Ad-Hoc modes are not interoperable."

So, what are my driver and firmware versions?
 From my dmesg output:

wvlan_cs: WaveLAN/IEEE PCMCIA driver v1.0.6
wvlan_cs: (c) Andreas Neuhaus <andy at fasta.fh-dortmund.de>
wvlan_cs: index 0x01: Vcc 5.0, irq 29, io 0xf6000000-0xf600003f
wvlan_cs: Registered netdevice eth0
wvlan_cs: local=c3872800 dev=c3918600 link=c384b180

wvlan_cs: MAC address on eth0 is 00 02 2d c2 d7 55
wvlan_cs: Found firmware 0x8000A (vendor 1) - Firmware capabilities : 
1-2-1-1-1
wvlan_cs: MAC address on eth0 is 00 02 2d c2 d7 55
wvlan_cs: Found firmware 0x8000A (vendor 1) - Firmware capabilities : 
1-2-1-1-1
CSLIP: code copyright 1989 Regents of the University of California
PPP generic driver version 2.4.2
devfs_register(ppp): could not append to parent, err: -17
eth0: no IPv6 routers present
wvlan_cs: MAC address on eth0 is 00 02 2d c2 d7 55
wvlan_cs: Found firmware 0x8000A (vendor 1) - Firmware capabilities : 
1-2-1-1-1
wvlan_cs: Valid channels: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
wvlan_cs: MAC address on eth0 is 00 02 2d c2 d7 55
wvlan_cs: Found firmware 0x8000A (vendor 1) - Firmware capabilities : 
1-2-1-1-1
wvlan_cs: Valid channels: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
eth0: no IPv6 routers present

I do not know how to check the firmware version on an iPaq operated by 
Familiar Linux, but if I put my Dell Truemobile 1150 WLAN adapters in my 
windows laptop, using the Truemobile 1150 Client Manager, I can read:

Firmware:
    Primary Functions firmware      Variant 1, Version 4.04
    Station Functions firmware        Variant 1, Version 8.10
       Firmware ID: CFW 03101-08010

So.... after the problem statement, here come the questions:

1) How can I have my Dell Truemobile 1150 working in Ad Hoc Demo Mode?
2) If  I set my Dell Truemobile 1150 in Ad Hoc Demo Mode, will a laptop 
using a D-link AirPlus DWL 650+ WLAN adapter be able to connect to the 
Dell WLAN adapter (once they are set to work on the same SSID, of course)?

I know this mail was a hassle..... please can someone put the light at 
the end of the tunnel?

Thx

Claudio