usb wifi dongle

[Ian D. Stewart]

On Mon, 2004-09-06 at 09:20, eric tanguy wrote:
> In a week i will obtain a usb wifi dongle based on Prism GT (ISL3890). Is
> this hardware supported by kernel modules or do i have to install extra
> modules ??

Eric,

The Prism chipset is supported by the linux-wlan-ng project
(http://www.linux-wlan.org).  There is an RPM based on linux-wlan-ng
1.21-pre14 available for Fedore Core 1 at
http://prism2.unixguru.raleigh.nc.us/v21-fc1-index.html.

If you are running Fedora Core 2, you will need to build from source. 
You can get the latest source from
ftp://ftp.linux-wlan.org/pub/linux-wlan-ng/.  I would recommend going
with linux-wlan-ng-0.2.1-pre20 in order to get relatively reliable
support for the 2.6 kernel.

Once you've downloaded the source, if you follow the instructions in the
howto at http://www.siliconvalleyccie.com/linux-hn/wmp11-linux.htm you
should be good to go.

There is one caveat however.  When you run 'make config' when building
linux-wlan-ng, it tests to ensure that you have the linux kernel source
(and not just the headers) installed.  It does this by checking for
version.h in the linux source directory that was specified earlier in
the configuration process (it defaults to /usr/src/linux). 
Unfortunately, this file is only generated when module versioning is
enabled (it is disabled by default, as it still flagged as
'experimental'), so before you can build linux-wlan-ng, you must first
enable module versioning in the module.

This is the process that I followed to get my WMP11 working under Linux,
and I haven't had any problems yet.


Ian