My sincere thanks to Craig
(
http://www.houseofcraig.net/acx100_howto.php) for his very well
written How to.
Honestly, I'd been looking all over and trying stuff for over a month
with no luck. It took me about 20 hours of work, but I'll tell you
about all the problems I had so you should be able to do it in under
an hour.
Note, this driver only works with (as Craig says), "Texas Instruments'
Acx100-based wireless PCI and/or CardBus that typically either have a
"+" in their name or model number or that claim a 22mbps top speed.
The "+" comes from the 802.11b+ "standard" which is actually not a
real standard, but a Texas Instruments' invention using 802.11b"
Craig has lots of binaries on his site that will work for most people.
If you're kernel is 2.4.20-8, then it's just a matter of putting
about 6 drivers in the right spot and configuring about ten files.
My trouble was due to the fact that I did a complete install on my
Dell Inspiron 8200, and for some reason, the kernel version turned out
to be 2.4.20-6.
When I did an upgrade on my girlfriend's laptop, it was 2.4.20-8. I
don't get it. Maybe someone can explain this to me.
Anyway, like he says on his site, if the version of his drivers don't
match your kernel's version (as determined by typing "uname -r"),
don't waste your time. He has a link where you can get the source and
compile it yourself. This would n normally be quite painless and
quick, but I had been seeing posts from people who claimed that this
wireless card, the DWL-650+ was recognized by their system without any
modification so I first tried to recompile my kernel. I hadn't done
this in years, and I got errors the first two times and the next time
it didn't even beep when I removed the 650+ like my original kernel
did.
As you may know, when you recompile your kernel, the system creates
another source tree in /lib/modules and adds the word "Custom" on the
end of the version. So my new kernel was called 2.4.20-6custom and it
had its own source path and associated files that the installer put in
/boot.
But even though I was booting on my regular kernel (2.4.20-6), when I
compiled the source for the driver called "acx100_pci.o" and installed
it in the correct location, I kept getting an error message in
/var/log/messages that said that my kernel was 2.4.20-6 but that the
driver was compiled with 2.4.20-6custom.
After scrutinizing the README that came with the source for
acx100_pci.o, I learned that if I was having trouble, I should copy
the file "/boot/vmlinuz.version.h" to
/lib/modules/2.4.20-6/build/include/linux/version.h . I couldn't find
that file in /boot and when I inspected the one in
/lib/modules/2.4.20-6/build/include/linux/ I saw that it had a
reference to 2.4.20-6custom. I edited that file and removed "custom"
and that error went away.
Craig mentions that sometimes you can sometimes ignore unresolved
symbol errors pointing to the acx100_pci.o module. I found that I get
this error no matter what I do, but it works fine. So it's important
to realize that you may get BOTH unresolved symbol AND unmatching
versions errors and you definitely need to take care of the unmatching
versions problem and then test the card before worrying about
unresolved symbol errors.
Craig said that sometimes you need to type iwconfig eth1 essid XXXXX
to get the card to start working, but I found that watching the boot
messages on the screen always reveals that the card starts up and gets
associated.
The only thing I need to do after the machine boots is type "route add
default gw 192.168.2.1 eth1". I had to do this every time so I put
the command in bashrc and now immediately following a boot I can use
my browser and I always connect.
Please note that I have another network interface (eth0) that I had
unplugged for these tests. I can unplug the wireless card, restart
networking, and this works fine too.
One last warning: Don't use the network tool to configure your
wireless card! You will need to edit the following files by hand and
be careful not to clobber any of them with any system tools. For the
CardBus cards (pcmcia), this is all taken care of. eth1 appears
magically whenever the card is inserted and goes away when it's pulled
out.
* /etc/hosts
* /etc/hostname
* /etc/resolv.conf
* /etc/modules.conf
* /etc/sysconfig/network
* /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcg-eth1
Again, Many Thanks to Craig for his important contribution!
Similar Threads
Linear Mode
