wireless pcmcia card - newbie

Hello everybody.

I have just bought myself a Dell inspiron 1100 laptop, and an
Actiontec Wireless PCMCIA card - 802.11b i believe. I know the card is
recognised, because in the KDE Info centre, I look under "PCMCIA" and
see "Actiontec wireless" displayed.

Does this mean that I have a kernel driver installed for the card, and
that it is ready to roll, or do I have to somehow find a driver?

If I do have to search for a module, any ideas where to get one?
Actiontec is not well-known, though I have a slight suspicion that it
is based on the Prism2 chipset (dont quote me on that though).

If not, any pointers on how to set the damn thing up - it seems to be
much harder than normal networking.

cheers in advance,
matt morten


reverence

Matt, it depends on the chipset of the wireless card. If your Actiontec
card is based on the Prism chipset, you're in luck-- Prism is
well-supported in Linux. However, there is at least one Actiontec card
that has the Atmel chipset, and I am not so certain about whether you
can get a Linux driver for it.

The place to go to find out for sure is
http://www.linux-wlan.org/docs/wlan_adapters.html This gives a complete
list of what cards are out there, what their architecture and chipset
is. They also have drivers available for download.

I myself have just installed a wireless card in a RH 8 machine and am
working to get it going. If you happen to have a Prism 2/2.5/3 wireless
card, you can download driver RPMs at
http://prism2.unixguru.raleigh.nc.us. For complete documentation, he
refers you back to the linux-wlan site. You know where I'll be spending
time over the next few days :<) --mrkurt

reverence wrote:
> Hello everybody.
>
> I have just bought myself a Dell inspiron 1100 laptop, and an
> Actiontec Wireless PCMCIA card - 802.11b i believe. I know the card is
> recognised, because in the KDE Info centre, I look under "PCMCIA" and
> see "Actiontec wireless" displayed.
>
> Does this mean that I have a kernel driver installed for the card, and
> that it is ready to roll, or do I have to somehow find a driver?
>
> If I do have to search for a module, any ideas where to get one?
> Actiontec is not well-known, though I have a slight suspicion that it
> is based on the Prism2 chipset (dont quote me on that though).
>
> If not, any pointers on how to set the damn thing up - it seems to be
> much harder than normal networking.
>
> cheers in advance,
> matt morten