On my laptop I have a Compaq W200 mulitport WLAN card. Drivers for this and similar cards exist at http://www.nongnu.org/orinoco. The orinoco-usb driver is for now only available from cvs. I put together this page to simplify the building and installation of the driver. The driver and script to build the driver, are all available from the RPMS directory.
The following cards are known to work with orinoco-usb:
I also have instructions on how to install, how to build packages and how to configure the card.
If the driver fails to install or if you have installed the driver and the card doesn't work, I might be able to help you. But before you ask, do the following:
$ su (root password) $ mv /var/log/messages /var/log/messages.old $ reboot
When your machine has started again, remove and insert card or try to turn the card on and off(*). Then send me /var/log/messages, a little info about your machine (Type/Name/Vendor/Linux distribution) and you wirelss card (Name) and the output of the following commands:
$ su (root password) $ rpm -qa|grep kernel $ rpm -qa|grep orinoco $ uname -a $ iwconfig $ ls -lR /usr/lib/hotplug $ dmesg $ lspci -vv
Please compress the files before you send them!
It should be straightforward to configure the card with your distro's network-tool. If you have a question about configuring the card you might be better off asking for help on distro specific forum, since all my machines run SUSE. If you have any questions about advanced wireless features please search the lists at http://www.nongnu.org/orinoco/lists/ before you ask me.
(*) On my laptop there is a small symbol on the F2-key. It looks like a radio tower/antenna. I need hit the fn-key together with f2 to activate the card. It might be different on your machine.
My old laptop has crashed, and I decided to chuck in the garbage bin. This means that I no longer have an orinoco-usb device. Hence, I will stop maintaining the script which creates orinoco-usb rpms.
There has been a few changes to the latest orinoco_usb code, and I have yet to figure out how to include the firmware in the driver itself. Users of kernels 2.6.17 and above must now download the firmware and put it the appropriate folder. You can check the kernel version with
$ uname -r
Download the firmware with following statement
wget -c http://folk.uio.no/oeysteio/orinoco-usb/orinoco_ezusb_fw
On openSUSE 10.2 it should probably go in /lib/firmware. I have no way to check this since i no longer have an orinoco-usb device.
My orinoco-usb build script does not work with kernel 2.6.15 and above. I'll fix it when SUSE 10.1 is released.
I got an e-mail from Stephanie Liese:
On my laptop (Compaq, Evo N410c, Fedora 3, Kernel 2.6.11), firmware needs to go in /lib/firmware. So it didn't work until I moved orinoco_ezusb_fw from /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware to /lib/firmware.
Thanks!
Thanks to a tip from Martin Visser, the firmware package is no longer necessary. The firmware is hard-coded into the driver instead. In short if you use a driver which is newer that April 4th 2005 or if you use build-source.sh, you can safely ignore all instructions related to the firmware and hotplug.
New firmware package. The firmware is now included with orinoco-usb-firmware.noarch.rpm, and not downloaded during the install. (Probably not legal, but I got tired of the all the cries for help.)
SUSE 9.2 rpms are now available, and these will be signed. You can import my new signature with the command
$ rpm -Uvh rpmkey-oystein-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
This rpm is here.
I now have rpms and build-script for 2.6.x kernels. The driver has been tested on SUSE 9.1 and Fedora Core 2. At least on SUSE 9.1 it works together with hotplugging, i.e. no more ifup/ifdown!