Wireless, D-LINK

[Rick Stevens]

Dexter Ang wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-03-16 at 08:49, Rick Stevens wrote:
> 
>>I can assure you that the D-Link DWL-650+ card (the one with the curved
>>antenna) will NOT work with Linux as it uses a TI chipset and they won't
>>release the API to open source.  It works quite well with ndiswrapper,
>>however.
> 
> 
> I do not know how to describe my card (it doesn't seem to have a curved
> antenna), but I am using the PCMCIA D-Link DWL-650+ on Fedora everyday.

On the 650+ I was referring to (there are apparently several models),
the edge of the plastic antenna sticking out of the top of the card is
slightly curved, making the card look sort of like Napoleon.

> It uses the TI chipset, which is "supported" by the acx100 project
> (acx100.sourceforge.net). If you want, you can get the kernel modules at
> dag.wieers.com (acx100-utils, and kernel-acx100-modules, or something
> like that). So it does work. It works well. Of course, the driver is
> only at 0.2.0pre7, which means it's for the brave at heart. I bought it
> since I couldn't find any Linksys ver3 pcmcia cards. Plus I did confirm
> with others on this list that it does work. The only thing you need is
> the binary files (RADIO.bin or something), from the dlink windows
> drivers.

If the acx100 driver requires the Windows driver files (the .bin and 
.inf files) as ndiswrapper does, there still is no "native" driver for
the card (you've got a wrapper program that issues Windows-ish calls to
the Windows drivers and translates the return values back to kernel
data).  Hey, it works and I'm not complaining.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-   Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the   -
-                     reader...who doesn't get it.                   -
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