On Thursday 22 December 2005 00:48, Simon Roberts wrote:

It looks like it's almost being recognized, but I have to admit that I don't entirely understand the output of either hwinfo or lsmod in this case. Both ifconfig and iwconfig look less than promising though: <major snippage>

I just read a discussion which seems to indicate that hostap_pci has had support for firmware versions predating the module release hacked/cobbled in after-the-fact to support earlier versions of this card *and* it is also prone to misidentifying the installed firmware version, which it is sensitive to I'd identify the card's chipset and firmware version and see if there are any firmware updates available. Can you afford to spend some time at D-Link's website? - Carl

On Thursday 22 December 2005 08:10, Ken Schneider wrote:

I use it for my linksys wireless card and it works excellent.

Hi Ken, Hi All... This is likely his solution, but that card model number has been in existence for a long time and undergone many revisions. He still needs to know which of the three possible chipsets he's coping with and whether or not the firmware is up to date, don't you think? - Carl

On Thursday 22 December 2005 08:48, Ken Schneider wrote:

Not if he uses the driver disk/CD that came with the card along with ndiswrapper.

Simon was hoping to implement a native solution, if one is available and not too big a PITA to set up. A native module exists for that card model number, but there are three possible chipsets and some number of firmware versions to contend with (long product life cycle.) AIUI, the native module requires the latest available firmware and only works with one of the three possible chipsets. That is why I suggested going to D-Link's website to verify which chipset and firmware versions he's dealing with. Wasn't this clear from the existing thread? - Carl

A search on DLink's website says "this is discontinuted, click here for a replacement product"! Nothing, zip, nada, except the chance to buy something else from them. No old manuals, no drivers, nothing. Pretty bad on DLink's part, methinks! Makes me glad I've mostly bought from other manufacturers! For now, I'll persue the ndiswrapper, as I do have the original CD that came with it. Thanks all for the help and ideas, I'll still be monitoring in case anyone has a flash of further genius, and will report back on the wrapper progress. Cheers, Simon --- Stan Glasoe wrote:

On Thursday 22 December 2005 9:10 am, Carl Hartung wrote:

...

On Thursday 22 December 2005 08:48, Ken Schneider wrote:

...

Not if he uses the driver disk/CD that came with the card along with ndiswrapper.

Simon was hoping to implement a native solution, if one is available and not too big a PITA to set up. A native module exists for that card model number, but there are three possible chipsets and some number of firmware versions to contend with (long product life cycle.) AIUI, the native module requires the latest available firmware and only works with one of the three possible chipsets. That is why I suggested going to D-Link's website to verify which chipset and firmware versions he's dealing with.

Wasn't this clear from the existing thread? - Carl

For any hardware I always advocate updating to the latest firmware/drivers unless there are known issues with the latest. Then go with the newest version that is known to work.

Those D-Link wireless cards have way too many hardware and firmware revisions per model number. You have to make sure you have the latest+greatest from D-Link. Their website is good for helping to identify the hardware revision and the appropriate firmware for that card.

Stan

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On Thursday 22 December 2005 11:35 am, Bruce Marshall wrote:

I dabbled with wireless about 6 months ago and found that the Dlink 520 was the only card that worked out of the box. I haven't jumped in here because someone mentioned that there were several sets of chips for that card.

Here's the pertinent info on a card that works. Note the use of the ath_pci module. You should make sure that is loaded if your hwinfo shows the same.

Vendor: pci 0x168c "Atheros Communications, Inc." Device: pci 0x0013 "AR5212 802.11abg NIC" SubVendor: pci 0x1186 "D-Link System Inc" SubDevice: pci 0x3a13 "DWL-G520 Wireless PCI Adapter rev. B" Revision: 0x01 Driver: "ath_pci" Device File: ath0 Features: WLAN

That's a newer version due to the "G" and the 802.11 a/b/g capabilities. It should work out of the box since it is a current model. I think Simon is trying to use a much older version but I'll wait for him to give us the exact details off the card. Stan

On Thursday 22 December 2005 1:12 pm, Simon Roberts wrote:

Yes, mine is a 520E, not a G520. It's one of the 802.11b models they sold off cheap when 802.11g became pretty much the standard. So, it was presumably old-stock by the time they bought it perhaps 18 months ago.

It looks like it's a prism card, but I can't be sure. DLink don't say anything about it (that I can find) :(

Cheers, Simon

Please quit top-posting and only reply to the list. I don't need another copy sent directly to me since I'm on this list! http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=153297 has a wealth of information. I did a quick google on "Linux D-Link DWL 520E" and found lots of stuff. One of the posts on the above link lists chipsets for the various revisions of the DWL-520 card. Stan

On Thursday 22 December 2005 15:23, Simon Roberts wrote:

Well, that thread leads to this: http://www.oakcourt.dyndns.org/~andrew/dwl520e1.html

Simon, After looking these pages over, if it were me, I'd just download the latest Win drivers from dlink and use ndiswrapper. I think it'll be faster in the long run and the system will be much easier to maintain. My 2 cents, FWIW... - Carl

...

Many thanks to all (sorry about "top-posting"--is that just a fancy name for hitting "reply to all" or am I doing something else rude too? ...

"top-posting" is the act of putting you reply ON TOP of the email you are replying to. Unlike me where I put my reply under your response. Most of us treat this as being plain lazy and not showing courtesy to others on the list that are trying to help you. It also makes it very hard to follow when searching the archives for answers. If you continue to top post everything you send out most people will stop helping you.

Amazing! It's 20 years since I first started using UUCP/usenet news and the like (yup, dial up lines, SLIP and UUCP--any UK refugees remember "thar" :), and I've always prefered the newest stuff at the top where I can see it immediately. Nobody ever told me that was bad before, but I'll do my best to remember that this is in fact not considered proper. I guess you're never too old to learn something :) Anyway, many thanks for all of your patience and help. I'm going to try the two options of the ndiswrapper and the hostap driver with the installer for the firmware and then if that hasn't worked, I'll have to give up. I'm optimistic though, I've learned a lot in this exchange, and not just about netiquette! Cheers, Simon "You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." — Naguib Mahfouz __________________________________________ Yahoo! DSL – Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less. dsl.yahoo.com

--- Carl Hartung wrote:

Hi Simon,

Glad to see ndiswrapper as your first choice. The whole point of our research was to ascertain if that card was the relatively straightforward revision to configure or the PITA. It's the PITA revision, so, considering the application and the headache required to set it up natively (which still may or may not work reliably, you know) I just don't think it's worth the

trouble.

Have fun and good luck!

- Carl

Well, now I have a new problem, well, it was there all along, but now it matters :( I did a fresh reinstallation of this, including ndiswrapper, but the system recognizes the card and loads the modules for it (orinoco, orinoco_pci) and it shows up in Yast before I configure ndiswrapper. This appears to prevent ndiswrapper from getting any real control of the device. That is, when I run ndiswrapper I don't get any new device in Yast that I can configure (the existing one is still there, but doesn't work). I've tried doing modprobe -r on the orinoco stuff, but that doesn't help immediately, and if I reboot, then orinoco is back. Further, after rebooting, ndiswrapper isn't loaded, and if I load it this time, the machine freezes totally. I think I need to get it to stop loading the orinoco stuff, does that seem reasonable? Trouble is I don't know how to do that. I read stuff about modprobe.conf, and modprobe.d, and couldn't work out how the heck it's getting loaded in the first place, as there's nothing in modprobe.conf or modprobe.conf.local that mentions it, and the file in modeprobe.d that mentioned it doesn't change anything if I hide it from the system. So, I guess the question is now, how do I force the system to not load a module? Many thanks in advance. I'd have given up long ago and bought a new card if it was my own, but I guess I'm learning a lot about all kinds of potentially valuable stuff. Cheers, Simon "You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." — Naguib Mahfouz __________________________________________ Yahoo! DSL – Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less. dsl.yahoo.com

--- Simon Roberts wrote:

I'm now trying this:

remove wireless card reinstall from scratch remove orinoco binaries from /lib/modules... install ndiswrapper install ndis driver reinstall card reboot modprobe ndiswrapper run Yast do the hokey pokey prayer Mr Saavik...

Well, still nothing. Yast finds the blasted card even before the ndiswrapper is loaded, and when I load ndiswrapper, the machine crashes. Many, many thanks to all who helped me with this, I know I've learned a lot about several things, but this is going to ruin my Christmas if I spend any more time on it, so I must give up and this poor kid will have to have Windows back again. So, merry Christmas (or whatever midwinter you might celebrate) and many thanks to all, Cheers, Simon "You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." — Naguib Mahfouz __________________________________ Yahoo! for Good - Make a difference this year. http://brand.yahoo.com/cybergivingweek2005/

On Fri, 23 Dec 2005 15:57:55 -0600, you wrote:

Simon Roberts wrote:

...

--- Simon Roberts wrote:

...

I'm now trying this:

remove wireless card reinstall from scratch remove orinoco binaries from /lib/modules... install ndiswrapper install ndis driver reinstall card reboot modprobe ndiswrapper run Yast do the hokey pokey prayer Mr Saavik...

Well, still nothing. Yast finds the blasted card even before the ndiswrapper is loaded, and when I load ndiswrapper, the machine crashes.

Many, many thanks to all who helped me with this, I know I've learned a lot about several things, but this is going to ruin my Christmas if I spend any more time on it, so I must give up and this poor kid will have to have Windows back again.

So, merry Christmas (or whatever midwinter you might celebrate) and many thanks to all,

As it Christmas why don't you ask his dad to buy him a D-Link AirXpert DWL-AG650 then you can plug it in and 2 minutes config and it's up and running.

Just my 2cents worth.

Wishing all out there in Linux land a very Happy Christmas

Alan

As a veteran of several D-Link wars, why not go with a Linksys G card - I got mine to work in something like 10 minutes (using ndiswrapper and SuSE 10.). Happy holidays. Mike- -- Mornings: Evolution in action. Only the grumpy will survive. -- Please note - Due to the intense volume of spam, we have installed site-wide spam filters at catherders.com. If email from you bounces, try non-HTML, non-encoded, non-attachments.

--- Carl Hartung wrote: ...

"Linux will keep autoloading the prism driver every time the card is detected, which will prevent ndiswrapper from being able to use it. To get around this, you can either disable the prism module manually (rmmod) and then re-load ndiswrapper or you can blacklist it from loading at all. Under 10 you should be able to simply use

~# echo "blacklist <name>" >> /etc/modprobe.conf.local

10.0 may also have /etc/hotplug/blacklist but it sounds like it is to be deprecated soon.

Also, check if the modules are in /etc/modprobe.preload, since modules in that file are loaded when booting.

If I had a running 10.0 and a wireless anything around here to play with, I'd get more aggressive at trying to help you solve this... and I know it can be solved, btw... but I'm on 9.3 and CAT5.

regards,

- Carl

Well, as it turned out, I did buy a little more time, and did have one more try at this, based on your suggestions Carl. However, still no joy. I'll note the things that I found in the hopes that it might possibly help someone somewhere (or might illicit comments that would add to my knowledge of the device driver system). 1) I rebuilt from scratch again, with a minimal install using KDE and the addition of ndiswrapper. The card was taken out of the system during the build. 2) I got everything except networking running smoothly, and then added the card. Sure enough, it appeared in yast, but not in response to ifconfig nor iwconfig. 3) I added blacklist entries for orinoco_pci, orinoco, hostap_pci, hostap, prism2_pci, prism54 to the file /etc/modprobe.conf.local. NOTE: This didn't change anything, the modules still loaded quite happily... 4) I added entries for those modules of the form: install <module> /bin/true Which was intended to have a second go at preventing the drivers loading. This seemed to work. lsmod didn't show anything for this card now. However, yast _still_ sees the stupid thing (though it takes a heck of a long time doing its "Detect network devices" step. 5) I dropped out of yast without messing, then ran: ndiswrapper -i /media/dvdwriter/...blah/NETPRISM.inf ndiswrapper -m both of which ran without complaint. 6) Rebooting, I find that ndiswrapper doesn't show up in lsmod unless I kick it. I'm not entirely suprised, but I don't get too down into this. Instead, I load the module by hand. 7) Configuring the card using Yast seems largely unproductive on the surface, but I notice: a) the link activity light on the card is flickering b) iwconfig tells me that the card is configured (ESSID, keys, etc) c) the signal seems good d) but there is no link. 8) I mess about with iwconfig, ifconfig, yast, and a spare wireless AP configured without encryption till I'm blue in the face. The little light keeps flashing and nothing else happens :( So, the poor kid is back with whinedoze again, and I'm feeling impotent. On the plus side, I've learned stuff about wireless tools, and the module loading/control mechanisms that, while incomplete, will serve me well in the future. Thanks again to all who offered input, I would heartily recommend staying away from DLink stuff on Linux, but frankly have no clue what to suggest instead! (at least for a PCI card, my laptop is completely happy :) Happy new year, Cheers, Simon c) the "You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." — Naguib Mahfouz __________________________________ Yahoo! for Good - Make a difference this year. http://brand.yahoo.com/cybergivingweek2005/

On Saturday 31 December 2005 14:52, Simon Roberts wrote: <snip>

Thanks again to all who offered input... <snip>

Hi Simon, Thank *you* for reporting this miserable experience back to the list. Maybe it'll help someone else circumvent the problem. That card model just has too many 'flavors'... with only one, the latest, appearing to be supported to a reasonable degree. Since I'd already identified that one as being a PITA variety, and ndiswrapper being pretty much your only hope... don't feel bad. I think you went well above the the call of duty. Regards & Happy New Year! - Carl

On Thursday 22 December 2005 10:39 am, Simon Roberts wrote:

A search on DLink's website says "this is discontinuted, click here for a replacement product"! Nothing, zip, nada, except the chance to buy something else from them. No old manuals, no drivers, nothing. Pretty bad on DLink's part, methinks! Makes me glad I've mostly bought from other manufacturers!

For now, I'll persue the ndiswrapper, as I do have the original CD that came with it.

Thanks all for the help and ideas, I'll still be monitoring in case anyone has a flash of further genius, and will report back on the wrapper progress.

Cheers, Simon

Go to the Support page first then search on the DWL series and then whichever 520 series you actually have. The 520 is old. The last drivers they show are for Win98 so this really dates the card a wee bit. I haven't played with a PCI wireless card this old in Linux before so I'm not going to have much more specific help. A newer PCI or even USB wireless device may be easier and faster to get going. Especially the USB versions that have a 1 meter or so cord so you can position the antennae in a more advantageous spot for reception. Stan

Well, continuing thanks to all who are trying to help. Here's the situation so far: DLink's site enables me to identify the card as a DWL-520 Rev E. I can't find anything about the chipset on that site though. I've been persistent to the point of screaming at it, but maybe that's still not enough :( The system, without any help, made the same identification Based--presumably--on that identification, the system loads "orinoco" "orinoco_pci" and "hermes" modules into the kernel. Yast->network interfaces sees this and claims it's letting me configure it, but I don't get a working system from this config, neither do I reliably see the wlan0 device in either ifconfig or iwconfig. At one point if I did "ifconfig wlan0 up" it would appear in the listing, but now it just says "no such device" I don't know what I might have changed to make this behavior change :( The ndiswrapper appeared to work, and had the card flashing its little activity light, but I still get nothing useful out of it. Clearly now I've been messing about too long as random things are starting to happen. It now crashes when I try "modprobe ndiswrapper" which is new. I've tried unloading the orinoco, orinoco_pci, and hermes drivers prior to loading the ndiswrapper, but that doesn't seem to help :( Any thoughts, suggestions, ideas? One thing I belive would be useful to know, would be how to prevent the orinoco module from loading at all. It seems to me that it has to be asking for trouble to have that loaded, and trying to access the hardware, at the same time I kick off the ndiswrapper bits that will try to access the same hardware. Frankly, if I thought there was a good chance of this kid sticking with Linux, I'd buy her a new wireless card. However, I know she plays a few windows games, so I'm less willing to go spending money on it. That said, can someone recommend a totally reliable PCI wireless card that I could get--preferably a cheaper one, 802.11b would be fine, as that's the router they have--that I can be confident of? Thanks all for your efforts. Cheers, Simon --- Carl Hartung wrote:

On Thursday 22 December 2005 11:39, Simon Roberts wrote:

...

A search on DLink's website says "this is discontinuted...

Nothing pays off like persistence, Simon. There's a lot of stuff there for all the different flavors of that card. No matter which route you take, you might as well verify the card version/chipset, driver and firmware you're dealing with. And there may be enough information there that you /can/ run native support, but you'll need this information to determine that and to set it up.

Roadmap 1: http://www.dlink.com -> click 'support' link at top of page -> select "DWL" in left drop-down list -> select "520" in right drop-down list -> note there is also a "520+" in that list -> click "go!" -> land on page "Please select your revision of the DWL-520": -> Revisions A thru E are well described -> End-of-life product drivers and specs are provided, with FAQs

Roadmap 2:

http://www.dlink.com -> click 'support' link at top of page -> in right column, select "FTP Site" -> drill down to DWL-500 directory (NIC->dwl500 directory)

Good luck & regards,

- Carl

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