[lwlan-user] SUCCESS! Belkin F5D6020u PCMCIA Wireless Card

[Mike Taylor]

I'd like to think everyone who's responded to my various cries for
help regarding this wireless card.  I've had _a lot_ of different
suggestions!

David Hinds <dhinds@sonic.net>, who maintains the Linux PCMCIA
services package, pointed out that the card was being configured at
0x100-0x11f so should try excluding that address range too so that the
card gets configured somewhere else.  Neat idea, but it didn't help.

Iain Broadfoot <ibroadfo@cis.strath.ac.uk>, who has a F5D6020 working
in his own Linux Laptop suggested that I start get getting a more up
to date kernel.  I made that the option of last resort, since my
experience with upgrading kernels has not been great in the past.
(Yeah, I know, I should be such a wuss ... :-)

I had been using the orinoco_cs driver, version 0.06, which is what
came out of the box on my Red Hat 7.2 system.  Three of you suggested
I use different drivers: David Gibson <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
(who is the author of the Orinoco driver) suggested an up-to-date
version; Jean Tourrilhes <jt@bougret.hpl.hp.com> (the maintainer of
the Wireless Linux HOWTO) suggested the HostAP driver, and Nathan
Mattick <nmattick@axxcelera.com> suggested wlan-ng stuff.  You were
all misled by my claim that the card had a Prism II chipset :-)

The best advice, as it turned out, came from the mysterious entity
known only as "alexd" <troff-news@blueyonder.co.uk>, who, apart from
joining the chorus telling me to upgrade (:-) pointed out that:

	There are several versions of this card floating
	around and it would be helpful to know the one you
	have. Also, as the manfid is unique identifier for
	your piece of hardware, searching Google for you
	manfid will only come up with search results directly
	relevant to your hardware.

More prodding around on the web revealed that the tell-tale "u" on the
end of my card's name indicates that, in the grand tradition of such
things, it's a _totally_ different card.  The card has "Belkin F5D6020
ver.2" written on it, so the "ver.2" and the "u" _seem_ to be
different ways of saying the same thing.

I found an informative page at
	http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/HardwareComparison
which described the card thus:

	Card Name:         Belkin F5d6020 Ver.2
	Interface type(s): PCMCIA
	Power:             17 dBm (50mW)
	Price(s):          $30 (OfficeMax Dec-2002)
	Ant. Connector:    Yes, but what type? [WWW]connector and other pics
	Comments:          same as SMC 2632W V2 (aka. SMC2632W)
	Chipset:           Atmel AT76C502?A
	Drivers for:       Works w/linux [WWW]driver HOWTO  D

And a little more poking around turned up the AtmelWLANDriver project
at SourceForge (http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net) whence I
downloaded the most recent stable release,
atmelwlandriver.2.1.1.tar.bz2 (570689 bytes), which built more or less
out of the box (I had to comment out a couple of ioctls and the
MODULE_LICENSE() macro invocations because my kernel is so old).

The only remaining issue was figuring out which of the various drivers
in this package to use -- there are five variants of the PCMCIA
driver.  By trial and error, the card works with the pcmf502rd driver,
so I am now motoring along happily with the aid of the following entry
in my /etc/pcmcia/atmel.conf --

	card "Belkin F5D6020u (aka. F5D6020 ver.2) WLAN PC Card"
	  manfid 0x01bf, 0x3302
	  bind "pcmf502rd"

And I suggest that the AtmelWLANDriver people add this entry to their
distribution's copy of that file.

Finally, I contacted Chuck Gelm <nc8q@gelm.net>, whose archived
message to the linux-newbie list I'd seen somewhere on the web, and
which said he had the same card.  Seems he'd tried the Atmel driver
but without success.  Chuck, all I can say is try again!  Maybe you
were using the binary-only driver, which is fraught with problems?

Anyway, once more thanks to all.

 _/|_	 _______________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor   <mike@miketaylor.org.uk>   www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "Why people make unreadable Web pages is a mystery to me.
	 I think it has something to do with Art" -- Jane MacDonald.

--
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