Configuring the 'built-in' wireless cards in laptops

Hi All,

I wanted some help in recognizing and configuring the built-in
wireless cards that comes along with some of the laptops.

What type of card is it? Is it some modified version of a PCI device? or a
modified version of pcmcia (which i doubt).

I need to know this before I can try to figure out whats the device this is
supposed to be mapped onto.

Can somebody pls tell me where I can get the drivers for this?

any pointers to get started would be of great help,

TIA
Aj

(E-Mail Removed) (Aj) wrote in message news:<(E-Mail Removed). com>...
> Hi All,
>
> I wanted some help in recognizing and configuring the built-in
> wireless cards that comes along with some of the laptops.
>
> What type of card is it? Is it some modified version of a PCI device? or a
> modified version of pcmcia (which i doubt).
>
> I need to know this before I can try to figure out whats the device this is
> supposed to be mapped onto.
>
> Can somebody pls tell me where I can get the drivers for this?
>
> any pointers to get started would be of great help,
>
> TIA
> Aj

Most likely the wireless card is based on an Orinoco or Prism driver.
I found that I had to actually compile support for the wireless card
into the kernel and then Linux (Redhat 9, Mandrake 9.1) would
recognize and select the proper driver for the card. The first step is
to research how to compile your own kernel version and then add
wireless support to it. I've spent about two weeks learning this
process and by no means am I an expert, but it does work. At the same
time, you'll probably want to investigate making other changes like
ACPI support (if your laptop needs it) chip support, etc.

There are a number of resources on the internet for learning how to
modify and compile a new kernel.

Mark

Hi All,
thanks for the replies, I have configured the card and have got it
working now.

For the benefit of anybody who has had/will-have similar problems, let
me write in about it..

It was a pci device which you can list using 'lspci' and the device
driver required was PRISM2.5. The drivers for this is available at
http://www.linux-wlan.org/. I just downloaded the latest version of
the driver and followed the README and it was good enough.

You will need the source of the running kernel(pointed to by the link
/usr/src/linux)

once you have untarred the drivers, run configure n make n make
install, there are utils which you can use to make the card work in
infra/adhoc mode etc...

hope it helps the next guy who stumbles upon this problem :-)

Aj

(E-Mail Removed) (Mark Kelly) wrote in message news:<(E-Mail Removed). com>...
> (E-Mail Removed) (Aj) wrote in message news:<(E-Mail Removed). com>...
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I wanted some help in recognizing and configuring the built-in
> > wireless cards that comes along with some of the laptops.
> >
> > What type of card is it? Is it some modified version of a PCI device? or a
> > modified version of pcmcia (which i doubt).
> >
> > I need to know this before I can try to figure out whats the device this is
> > supposed to be mapped onto.
> >
> > Can somebody pls tell me where I can get the drivers for this?
> >
> > any pointers to get started would be of great help,
> >
> > TIA
> > Aj
>
> Most likely the wireless card is based on an Orinoco or Prism driver.
> I found that I had to actually compile support for the wireless card
> into the kernel and then Linux (Redhat 9, Mandrake 9.1) would
> recognize and select the proper driver for the card. The first step is
> to research how to compile your own kernel version and then add
> wireless support to it. I've spent about two weeks learning this
> process and by no means am I an expert, but it does work. At the same
> time, you'll probably want to investigate making other changes like
> ACPI support (if your laptop needs it) chip support, etc.
>
> There are a number of resources on the internet for learning how to
> modify and compile a new kernel.
>
> Mark