Ambicom Wl54-cf, Help with this 802.11g card Options

[teleute]

Has anyone been able (or has even tried) to get this card working on their Zaurus? I specifically bought the Ambicom because I know people were able to use the 802.11b from Ambicom with no problem, I believe because it was a Prism (2?) driver, which I've worked with a bit before. However, it appears the jerks have switched to TI chipsets without telling anyone. And from what I can tell, the TI drivers are nightmarish. Anyone heard of trying this? I've got an SL-5600, BTW. And it's not even beginning to recognise the card - doesn't even acknowledge that it exists.

Thanks!

[Da_Blitz]

didnt even know that another 802.11g CF card other than the linksys one exsisted. my advice would be to download the drivers, cross compile then try and install. but i would say youre probelly better off with a prism 2 based card

do you know the chipset? the ti stuff is normally somthing along the lines of ACX111, if so you can go and get the drivers at http://acx100.sourceforge.net/
and for info on installing: http://www.pcquest.com/content/linux/104010501.asp

keep in mind you will be dealing with the pcmcia and not the pci version. CF is basically pcmcia so in this case they are interchangable

hope that helps, reply back if you get it working as a couple of other people want 802.11g and have had problems getting the linksys driver to work

[teleute]

didnt even know that another 802.11g CF card other than the linksys one exsisted. my advice would be to download the drivers, cross compile then try and install. but i would say youre probelly better off with a prism 2 based card

Well, that's what I thought I was getting (based on the previous one). I was so choked to find out they'd switched.

do you know the chipset? the ti stuff is normally somthing along the lines of ACX111, if so you can go and get the drivers at http://acx100.sourceforge.net/
and for info on installing: http://www.pcquest.com/content/linux/104010501.asp

Well, the incredibly surly tech guy at Ambicom was only able to tell me "TI". From my reading, I would assume it's the TNETW1230, which the sourceforge people seem to believe falls under the ACX111 category.

I downloaded the sourceforge stuff the other day, but I didn't have make, and now I'm having problems getting that to work. (See my other post.) *sigh*

Even though I haven't been able to try the actual install yet, one thing that has been throwing me off on the sourceforge intructions - there's quite the large section on the firmware, which seems written quite specifically for D-link cards.

hope that helps, reply back if you get it working as a couple of other people want 802.11g and have had problems getting the linksys driver to work

Will do. Thanks!

[Da_Blitz]

i dont think you have to worry that much about it bieng dlink cards, as far as i know they are really the only cards that use the chipset that are redily avalible. firmware should work for all cards.

[teleute]

i dont think you have to worry that much about it bieng dlink cards, as far as i know they are really the only cards that use the chipset that are redily avalible. firmware should work for all cards.

*fingers crossed*

So I've now encountered another potential issue installing this driver. According to the README:

  In case the build fails, then please make sure that the symbolic link
  /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build exists and points to the matching
  kernel source directory. Now copy /boot/vmlinuz.version.h to
  /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/include/linux/version.h

The build failed, so I went looking for the aforementioned sym link. Sure enough, it wasn't there. So I went looking for the kernel source directory and can't find it. *sigh* Hopefully this is something I've overlooked as stupidly as my question on my other thread. Any ideas, anyone? Thanks. *sg*

[Da_Blitz]

lol they assume that you build the kernel on your pc for i386, they didnt take into aacout the fact that it might be an emmbeded device that get cross compiled for apps, i am sure there is a work around however, like compiling on the PC?

ethier way i thoght you should know that at least one of the PDA's on handhelds.org uses an ACX chipset, i belve it was the hx4700 so that could be a good place to start

[speculatrix]

when the card is installed, what does "cardctl status" and "cardctl ident" say? Can you "cardctl resume" and see if the status changes?

have you got a CF to PCMCIA adaptor, and be able to try the card on a linux box which has the ACX drivers installed? That way you can get an idea of how the card would behave if you had the right drivers on the Z.

[teleute]

lol they assume that you build the kernel on your pc for i386, they didnt take into aacout the fact that it might be an emmbeded device that get cross compiled for apps, i am sure there is a work around however, like compiling on the PC?

ethier way i thoght you should know that at least one of the PDA's on handhelds.org uses an ACX chipset, i belve it was the hx4700 so that could be a good place to start

Awesome...I'll check it out. Thanks! It's a bit encouraging, anyway...

[teleute]

when the card is installed, what does "cardctl status" and "cardctl ident" say? Can you "cardctl resume" and see if the status changes?

have you got a CF to PCMCIA adaptor, and be able to try the card on a linux box which has the ACX drivers installed? That way you can get an idea of how the card would behave if you had the right drivers on the Z.

"cardctl status" says:

Socket 0:
3.3V 16-bit PC Card
function 0: [ready]
Socket 1:
no card

"cardctl ident" says:

Socket 0:
product info: "Marvell", "88W8300 802.11g PC Card", "version 1.1", ""
manfid: 0x02df, 0x8103
function: 6 (network)

Socket 1:
no product info available


"cardctl resume" gives "ioctl(): device or resource busy"

[Da_Blitz]

could this be because you have no ACX drivers on your PDA? so it dosent know how to resume it. im not sure how pcmcia works but it make sense to me.

[teleute]

could this be because you have no ACX drivers on your PDA? so it dosent know how to resume it. im not sure how pcmcia works but it make sense to me.

Probably, but I can't figure out how to install the drivers without a kernel source directory, as that figures prominently in the instructions.

[maslovsky]

If anyone is willing to send this card to me I could try to build and use the http://lisas.de/~andi/acx100/ driver in Cacko ROM.

[teleute]

If anyone is willing to send this card to me I could try to build and use the http://lisas.de/~andi/acx100/ driver in Cacko ROM.

I'd love to advance the progress of science, but I can't afford to buy a new one if anything happened to it. And I really don't trust the post. Not to mention Customs...;-)

I appreciate the offer, and I'll keep an eye here in case anyone takes you up on this. Thanks!

[Da_Blitz]

if you download the testu kernel source code you would have all the headers you need to compile
then you make sure "/lib/modules/`uname -r`/build " is a symlink to wherever you put your source code (prehaps /usr/src/linux-2.4.20-PDA) so you would do

ln -s /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build /usr/src/linux-2.4.20-PDA

on your home computer and you should be able to compile after you stuff around with some command line paramaters for ./configure such as the --HOST=<name of type of computer you want to run program on> (--HOST=<*> should be somthing like xscale iwmmx or arm7 depending on how backwards compatible you want to be ant how your cross compiler was compiled, basically iwmmx for c*k's xscale for everything else and if all fails try arm7)

some one will have to help me fill in the details but thats the basics of it all, one question do you have a cross compiler installed? or are you just using the one that came with your distro?

if you make any progress i think i will get one, do you have a link to where you boaght it from?

[Da_Blitz]

btw acx100 is 802.11g
acx110 is unkown to me (seems like an all in one soulotion)
acx111 is 802.11G

however they are all covered by the one driver