New subject: pcmcia wireless lan not loading

Sunday, 17 February 2008

I have this Linksys WPC11 wireless pcmcia card (Prism2) that I use with 
my laptop under F8. It used to work fine in previous Fedora versions 
(circa FC4), but not in F8. When I insert it, it doesn't make any sound. 
The power light is on and steady, and the link line is on but blinking. 

/sbin/pccardctl ident

does find it and so does lspcmcia. 

I have 

alias wlan0 orinoco_cs

in /etc/modprobe.conf, and lsmod shows

orinoco_cs
orinoco
hermes
hostap_cs

/sbin/ifconfig -a does report sit0, wifi0-00 and wlan0 besides eth0 and 
lo. 

However, when I try to configure and bring the card up from within 
system-config-network it fails trying to determine the IP information.

I know this card should work with the wlan-ng drivers too, but 
yum list | grep -i wlan

returned nothing. I noticed also there is no other pcmcia package besides 
pcmciautils. 

Could someone please shed some light here? Specifically

1) How is pcmcia being handled in F8? Is it somehow via udev? 
2) Is there a linux-wlan-ng rpm for F8?
3) How do I diagnose the problem, step by step. Where should I look and 
what should I see when I insert the card? It seems to me that the system 
recognizes the card (both pcmcia and the network) but it can't talk to 
the router. 
4) What does it mean that the card does not beep when I insert it?

All the info I found on the web about this refers to earlier versions of 
Fedora and pcmcia (which I believe it has been replaced with something 
else in F8 of before).

Thanks.