Ambicom 1100C-CF and Cacko rom v1.21b

[caspian]

Hi, I installed Cacko\'s qtopia rom v1.21 and applied patch b on my 860.  First let me say this is an amazing rom!  I\'m loving it.

The only problem is that I can\'t get my Ambicom WL1100C wireless card working for the life of me.  Before you yell at me let me first say I\'ve been searching the forums for several days now and have tried almost everything anyone\'s mentioned.  I tried the wlan_ng drivers, then switched to the hermes.conf and tried those drivers, and finally loaded the hostap_cs driver package and tried that.  So far no luck.  The hostap drviers I have been trying are from hostap-wireless-drivers_1.12_arm.ipk from a link on this forum somewhere.

All three drivers do about the same thing: when  I plug in the card the \"activity\" led on the card starts blinking, but keeps blinking forever (rather than going solid indicating it has a link).  A lsmod shows the hostap_cs (or whichever driver I\'m using at the time) module loaded, so that\'s working.  iwconfig shows the freq changing every few seconds and the mode as \"Managed\", but it never finds the AP here in my house.  I\'m not using WEP, and my AP is broadcasting the SSID.   I might be worth mentioning that once, and only once, it did actually connect to my WAP, but about 15 seconds later (right after I issued a iwconfig and verified that it detected my ssid properly) it just disconnected form it again and started blonking the led again and hasn\'t connected since (even with the exact same configuration).

It\'s also worth noting that if I remove the Ambibom card and plug it into my old 5500 running OpenZaurus 3.3.5 it immediatly connects and finds my AP (using the hostap_cs drivers).  So I know it\'s not a configuration issue on my AP, it\'s something configured wrong on my 860.

Dmesg doesn\'t say much useful, it\'s different for each module.  I also started syslogd so I could see syslog messages in /var/log/messages, but I didn\'t find much of anything in there either :|  I could post a lot of output from these sources if it would help.

Thanks for any feedback!

[sefthuko]

I have yet to successfully auto-connect to anything with my c700 running the Cacko rom.  Instead, I dictate manually the gateway, IP, essid, and name server in the configuration.  I\'m not sure what success other people have had though.

[maslovsky]

Ambicom WL1100C works with default drivers, although autoconenction works poorly on Sharp based ROMs (including Cacko). When you specify all connection parameters, clear the Autoconnect check box and always conenct manualy.

[caspian]

I just tried that with all three drivers, still no luck.  I specified the ssid, IP, netmask, gw, dns, no autoconnect, etc.  Still same thing.  Plug card in and lights briefly turn on and go off.  When I click \"connect\" for the connection I made it starts blinking the led on the card and it never stops blinking.  After about a minute it says \"No connection was found\", and then the connection box says \"Network offline\".  At this point (with the hermes.conf) iwconfig will show the correct ssid, nickname, and mode, but an access point of 44:44:44:44:44:44... and the led just keeps blinking and searching for an access point :|  With the wlan_ng.conf iwconfig says \"No wireless extensions for eth0\" and with hostap_cs.conf it shows similar output to the hermes.conf -- the settings look good but it never finds the access point.  

Any other ideas?  Can you update the firmware on an ambicom wl1100c?  It\'s a prism 2.5.  I\'ve looked but haven\'t found anything.

[sefthuko]

Have you tried setting it manually using iwconfig?  Like:

iwconfig eth0 mode Managed essid MyWifiAP

[caspian]

Sure have, and unfortunately it does the same thing.

[sefthuko]

Well, the same thing happened to me using autodetect, but I got it working after specifying essid, network type (infrastructure), and wep in the Network interface ont he cacko rom.

I installed the hostap_cs drivers and somehow completely hosed my system, so on the next reflash I just used the hermes one.  Apart from that, I can\'t help you...  good luck!

[maslovsky]

Any other ideas? Can you update the firmware on an ambicom wl1100c? It\'s a prism 2.5. I\'ve looked but haven\'t found anything.

Yes, you need to use hopstap drivers to update firmware. More info here:

http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/

[caspian]

OK, so my firmware is *really* old, and I\'m sure now that that is the root cause of the problems I\'m having.

# hostap_diag eth0
Host AP driver diagnostics information for \'eth0\'

NICID: id=0x800c v1.0.0 (PRISM II (2.5) PCMCIA (SST parallel flash))
PRIID: id=0x0015 v1.0.7
STAID: id=0x001f v1.3.6 (station firmware)
#

So I did some research and decided to try primary firmware 1.1.1 and station firmware 1.8.0, but when I try to flash I get this:

# prism2_srec eth0 pk010101.hex sf010800.hex
srec summart for pk010101.hex
Component: 0x0015 1.1.1 (primary firmware)

srec summary for sf010800.hex
Component: 0x001f 1.8.0 (station firmware)

Could not read wlan PDA. This requires PRISM2_DOWNLOAD_SUPPORT definition in driver/module/hostap_config.h.
#

So, does anyone have a version of the hostap_cs package compiled with PRISM2_DOWNLOAD_SUPPORT and PRISM2_NON_VOLATILE_DOWNLOAD uncommented?

[maslovsky]

The package on the ZUG should have these options enabled (if I did not make a mistake building it

[caspian]

Unfortunately I\'m using the one from the ZUG, I just downloaded it and tried it again just to be sure.  I have the hostap-wireless-drivers_1.12_arm.ipk from the Drivers section that says it supports firmware updating.  It gives the error in my post above
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like it wasn\'t fixed before the compile.
For what it\'s worth, I just downloaded the hostap drivers (1.1.3), edited the hostap_config.h,  compiled it on my laptop, and got it to flash my card.  So I\'m guessing you just need to edit that file and recompile that package.

The bad news is that even though I\'m now running v1.1.1 and v1.8.0 firmware my card still doesn\'t want to work very well.  At one point I got it to connect to my home network again, but that was not using the GUI.  I had to remove all profiles, then do a cardctl scheme CardResume, then manually run iwconfig essid myssid.  Of course that\'s only worked once, so far it hasn\'t worked again.  Something is still seriously messed up with either my card or this rom!  Maybe the hostap v1.1.3 drivers would work better?

[maslovsky]

This is very strange. I have the same card, and it works perfectly with any driver. I suggest to try the card on another device (ex. Pocket PC), also try another WiFi card in your Zaurus.
Also if you can, try the card on a fresh ROM.
And finaly I\'d also check your access point for the latest firmware update.

That\'s all ideas I  have...

[Stephen]

So does anyone know where I can get a version of the hostap drivers with PRISM2_DOWNLOAD_SUPPORT and PRISM2_NON_VOLATILE_DOWNLOAD?   I need to be able to do the update on my Zaurus.

[zog]

So does anyone know where I can get a version of the hostap drivers with PRISM2_DOWNLOAD_SUPPORT and PRISM2_NON_VOLATILE_DOWNLOAD?   I need to be able to do the update on my Zaurus.

Anyone?

I know I will have to set up a development environment one day, but I'd like just to flash the card first.

[maslovsky]

If you can wait a little bit (maybe a week or so), I'm planning to use hostap drivers as default in the next Cacko ROM.