Trouble with Hawking wireless card.

[jamez1988]

I'm sooo confused. I can't figure out how to get this thing working.

I'm using ArchLinux. I have a hawking HWC54G wireless card. It's supported by wlan-ng, accourding to their compatability table. (I'm currently online using a wired hawking USB ethernet adapter on the same laptop.)

So, here we go. First, I made sure the wireless-tools package was installed, then I got wlan-ng26, for my 2.6 kernel. (You can see it at the top of my kernel buffer.)


installing wlan-ng26... done.
[james@wombat Opera]$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

sit0 no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

[james@wombat Opera]$ lsmod
Module Size Used by
ohci_hcd 23048 0
ehci_hcd 36488 0
pcspkr 4044 0
[james@wombat Opera]$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

sit0 no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

[james@wombat Opera]$ sudo modprobe wlan-ng
FATAL: Module wlan_ng not found.
[james@wombat Opera]$ sudo modprobe linux-wlan-ng
FATAL: Module linux_wlan_ng not found.
[james@wombat Opera]$ ifconfig etho0 down
etho0: unknown interface: No such device
[james@wombat Opera]$ lsmod
Module Size Used by
ohci_hcd 23048 0
ehci_hcd 36488 0
pcspkr 4044 0
analog 12704 0
ns558 6016 0
gameport 5120 2 analog,ns558
parport_pc 29252 0
parport 38600 1 parport_pc
yenta_socket 23560 1
rsrc_nonstatic 11648 1 yenta_socket
pcmcia_core 51488 2 yenta_socket,rsrc_nonstatic
i2c_piix4 9104 0
i2c_core 23296 1 i2c_piix4
uhci_hcd 33424 0
tsdev 8256 0
evdev 9984 0
rtl8150 14336 0
usbcore 125560 5 ohci_hcd,ehci_hcd,uhci_hcd,rtl8150
rtc 13260 0
[james@wombat Opera]$ ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:E0:4C:00:11:68
inet addr:192.168.1.100 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1540 Metric:1
RX packets:1992 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1969 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:1856622 (1.7 Mb) TX bytes:284633 (277.9 Kb)

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

[james@wombat Opera]$ help!!!


Ok, since I got that terminal dump, I figured out that the driver I need is called "prism54". It modprobes fine, but then I get stuck again. Help, please?

[quip]

Did you also download the firmware that needs to uploaded to the card's RAM during initialization? If so, did you put it in the correct directory, and is hotplug set up on your machine?

[jamez1988]

What firmware? I was under the impression that the firmware was already on the card - It works fine in Windows.

Hotplug starts up every time I turn on the laptop. It takes like 20 seconds and it's really annoying. I'm not even sure what it's supposed to be doing, as I always have to load up the modules for my network card and such manually.

I have installed, configured, and modprobed ndiswrapper. It loads fine, it says it found the card and the driver works, systems seem to be go, but iwconfig STILL can't find it, and wlan0 still does not exist on the system.

I've also used the ArchLinux specific utility hwd, a pretty good hardware driver detection utility. I've used it a bunch, and it's never been wrong yet. It says I need to run


sudo modprobe yenta_socket
sudo modprobe ds
sudo cardmgr


yenta_socket is preloaded, probaly hotplug's doing (a first!), modprobing ds freezes the terminal (leaving a thing on dmesg: "eth0: no IPv6 routers present"), and the cardmgr command cannot be found. I don't know what package I need to install to get it.

I'm not stupid, and I've configured everything on my system by hand except this WiFi card. (And a non-Linux compatable, obscure sound card.) I've spent like 7 hours trying to get this to work. It's really starting to annoy me. :mad:


EDIT!!!
IT'S UP!
I got ndiswrapper to work using the drivers on my cd. Located the router and all. Now, a new problem. I can see the router, it can see me, but I can't ping it, or anything!

[quip]

Like you said, the prism54 driver (http://www.prism54.org/ ) supports your chipset. If you read their README file, you will notice pretty easily that your card has no real on-board firmware. Several relatively new cards do this; they download firmware to on-board ram upon boot. Your card works in Windows because when you installed it, the installer set this up for you, and re-loads it each time.

I'm glad you got the card going. I can't help you with ndiswrapper, although someone else around here might be able to. I don't know what the ds module relates to. The error about "no IPv6 routers present" should not have anything to do with the freeze. Cardmgr is a command that comes with the pcmcia-cs-tools, which is a package that is usually needed to utilize your pcmcia card.

I don't know why hotplug is taking so long on your machine during boot. I've seen that issue raised before, but it's never been a problem for me. :D It is a very useful tool, however; it allows you to map some commands/drivers to hardware that you might plug-in/remove on a frequent basis (but it works on all pluggable equipment). So my mp3 player, printer, scanner, camera, camcorder, etc are all recognized and proper modules loaded whenever i plug them in.

Hope that clears up a few things...

[jamez1988]

Actualy, I haden't read anything about prism54. It came preinstalled. ndiswrapper seems to have flopped, I still can't connect to anything, so I'll go look at prism54 now.