Cacko 1.22 Rom + Nl-2511cf Mercury

[cjiph]

Hi,

I have a C860 with a NL-2511CF Mercury (prism2 based afik) wireless card. Unfortunatly it does not seem to work using the hostap drivers included with this ROM. It does however work with the hostap drivers supplied with OpenZaurus 3.5.2, and may have worked at somepoint with the wlan-ng drivers (I don't remember).

I'd really like to use the latest version of the Cacko ROM as I'm about to go to Japan and hopefuly will find the E/J program very useful, but would still like everything else to be in perfect english. However for me, I also find that wireless networking is essential for the Zaurus to turn it from a colourful brick into a usable computer ; ).

So:

* Has anoyine else managed to get such a card working in the latest ROM? How?
   (I have also tried turning off the autoconnect networking option, but this does not help me to connect to a network for which I don't know the essid)

* Is there a wlan-ng package (as was suggested in the original 1.22ROM post) I could try? I can't find one...

* Has anyone built a kernel (perhaps for other prism2 based cards) with hostap drivers which might work with this device?

Thanks in advance,
- Cj

[Optogeek]

I have two of these cards.  Both work with Cacko 1.22 without problem (if you have turned auto-connect off).  The card monitor will dentify them as Zonet ZCF1100 cards as this one card is sold with lots of diffent badges.

I always give the essid as both my home and work networks will not accept the 'Any' option (by design).  I also use kismet to check for access points.

[DRDR]

Hi,
Do you have the same dmesg error messages I am having with my D-Link card? Some people seem to get cards working by deactivating autoconnect and by supplying the ESSID. In my case and your case this does not seem to work. So what is the difference?

Without wireless, it's indeed a colorful brick... :-(

The weird thing is:

The CF Fast Ethernet card does connect but gives me TCP Write errors. But using Bluetooth Networks works with my Blue Monkey card. So the CF slot seems to be ok...

[iamasmith]

Turn off autoconnect, don't know what the problem is but if you do that then the card works.

I've got a Mercury card too and it does work with hostap! (card is actually manufactured by Senao)

- Andy

[cjiph]

Unfortunatly just disabling the auto-connect doesn't work for me, the problem is deeper than that. To be more precise, I can actually get wireless access by disabling auto-connect and then manually entering the essid, and I can even use Kismet to find a usuable essid. Having done this though the device is unsuably unstable, with the dmesgs dumping out lots of errors about timeouts.

Basically as I see it is that these cards which are infact Prism3 based (correction from my initial post), and complete rubbish:
Story of Saneo 2511 devices

This flakeyness means that to get such cards working properly is completely hit and miss. Since my last post I've wasted almost a day trying to get this wretched piece of crap to work. Specifically I've tried:

* Building my own kernel to try getting wlan-ng support back in. This was a deadend though, I gave up when the cacko-1.21 patch set didn't cleanly apply to the kernel sources linked to from the cacko website. Also I have no idea how to go about cross-compiling the user space utilities, or even how to install the Japanese hacks back into the kernel I'll need for the E<->J program later.

* Copying out the wlan-ng prism2 drivers from Cacko-1.21b. Wishful thinking, but didn't work as it seems ABI has changed too much (kernel panic in one of the user space programs).

* Copying out the hostap stuff from OpenZaurus-3.5.2. This was interesting, in OZ my wireless card works okay with the hostap drivers, and the modules seem to match up enough with the cacko kernel to work correctly. However while they seem to work correctly, they exhibit the same malfunctioning behaviour as the original Cacko ones.

From this I've concluded to fix my card I either need to modify the user space stuff to be like in OZ where it does work (no idea where to start). Or get wlan-ng back into cacko 1.22a, which also seems beyond my understanding.

So thanks to all those who replied so far, any help or other suggestions would be welcomed.
-Cj

[speculatrix]

This flakeyness means that to get such cards working properly is completely hit and miss. Since my last post I've wasted almost a day trying to get this wretched piece of crap to work. Specifically I've tried:

I have had reasonable success with a zcf card. It does work with kismet, seems to be reasonably sensitive. I did have to fiddle a bit to get it to work with my home wlan but its a bit of an odd-ball lan anyway.

Not had any joy using the WPA supplicant in cacko1.22; not sure the card supports it, but I was trying to connect to an apple airport extreme which is renowned for compatibility issues.

I would prefer to have a symbol/socket card as these are rate more highly, and also wish there was a supported 802.11g card for linux/zaurus. However, I got the card quite cheap off ebay, so I'm not disappointed.