Home: www.packetnexus.com
WaveLAN and RoamAbout Support in Linux Update: This information has been updated to include the WaveLAN (now known as Orinoco) 11Mbps Silver/Gold PC Cards and Cabletron RoamAbout PC Card. Additional information about using WEP (wired equivalent privacy) is available separately. This page is about using the WaveLAN wireless LAN PC card with Linux. A binary driver library is provided by Lucent for their older Turbo 8Mbps Bronze cards, but which also works with newer variants of the cards. The supported cards are: WaveLAN Turbo 8Mbps Bronze PC Card: This is 802.11 compliant only at 2Mbps. The 8Mbps mode is proprietary to Lucent. This card does not support WEP. WaveLAN Turbo 11Mbps Silver/Gold PC Card: These cards are 802.11 compliant at 11Mbps and support WEP with 40-bit and 128-bit encryption (for Silver and Gold respectively). I have not personally tested the Gold variant, but I believe the information here applies to it just as well. Cabletron RoamAbout: This card is OEM'ed from Lucent and is functionally identical to the WaveLAN Turbo 11Mbps PC Cards. It supports WEP too (40-bit and 128-bit versions available). Since these are all basically WaveLAN cards, I'll just refer to them all as WaveLAN below. The WaveLAN cards provide notebooks with wireless Ethernet connectivity via a base station known as an Access Point. The base station acts as a bridge between the wireless LAN and a wired Ethernet LAN. The WaveLAN cards have a little section that sticks out of the PCMCIA slot and houses the antenna; This is somewhat more elegant that having a separate antenna unit (as in the old WaveLAN designs). Required Software To use the WaveLAN card in Linux, you need to install at least two software. The first is the PCMCIA support, which typically already comes with your Linux distribution. You will need to have the source in order to compile support for the wireless PCMCIA card. Next, you also need to get the WaveLAN/IEEE Software for Linux. This is distributed by Lucent Technologies. The PCMCIA package itself also comes with a WaveLAN driver, but I don't know if this will work with the Turbo version of the card. Get the PCMCIA source from the PCMCIA Homepage. I am using version 3.1.6. WaveLAN/IEEE Software for Linux. I am using version 4.00. Linux Installation The installation procedure involves merging the WaveLAN driver source into the PCMCIA source, recompiling the PCMCIA software and then installing the PCMCIA package. Make sure you are running as the root user when you begin as the actual software installation and configuration requires root privileges. Extract the PCMCIA distribution archive. You need to specify the actual location of the archive. For our example here, we will build the source in /usr/src. $ cd /usr/src $ tar zxvf pcmcia-cs-3.1.6.tar.gz Extract the WaveLAN/IEEE distribution archive into the PCMCIA source directory. $ cd pcmcia-cs-3.1.6 $ tar zxvf wavelan2_cs-4.00.tar.gz For Red Hat users, you want to use the PCMCIA network script that Red Hat provides. The PCMCIA installation step replaces this script with its own unnecessarily more complicated version. So, save a copy of the Red Hat version now. $ cp /etc/pcmcia/network /etc/pcmcia/network.rh Build and install the PCMCIA package according to the instructions in the PCMCIA-HOWTO file (in the pcmcia-cs-3.1.6 directory). You can usually accept all the defaults in the make config step. $ make config $ make all $ make install For Red Hat users, you should use the PCMCIA network scri