Re: no capabilities for PCMCIA wireless network cards

[Wade Mealing <wmealing gmail com>]

> I have a PCMCIA network card that doesn't work with NetworkManager.  The
> problem is related to the fact that this card isn't seen to have any
> wireless capabilities in HAL, so NM doesn't pick it up and use it.
> 
> Have others seen this and is it being addressed?
> 
> Is this the right place to be raising this?
> 
> Rodd
>.
Saw a similar problem with my ma111 USB device.

Is the card seen at all in hal-device-manager ?  If it is.. I *think*
you should be able to hack up an pcmcia-yourcard.fdi file to make HAL
recognoise it as hardware with wireless capabilities.

For example, here is the fdi file that I created to get HAL to
correctly identify my USB wifi adapter. (Note: I have yet to get this
card working in NetworkManager, I believe it wlan-ng does not confirm
to wireless-tools standard of addressing the card).

You will have to modify this file to match your hardware device, you
should be able to find this device in hal-device-manager as mentioned
above.

/usr/share/hal/fdi/50user/usb-wireless-netgear-ma111.fdi

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->

<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="info.bus" string="usb">
     <match key="usb.product_id" int="16656">
      <merge key="info.capabilities" type="string">net.80211</merge>
      <merge key="info.product" type="string">Netgear MA111</merge>
      <merge key="net.linux.sysfs_path"
type="string">/sys/class/net/wlan0</merge>
      <merge key="net.interface" type="string">wlan0</merge>
      <merge key="net.linux.driver" type="string">prism2_usb</merge>
      <merge key="net.media" type="string">Ethernet</merge>
      <merge key="info.category" type="string">net.80211</merge>
     </match>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>


For a full description of  how this file works, (its pretty self
explanatory) check out
http://people.redhat.com/davidz/hal-spec/hal-spec.html

Put this file in the right place, restart hal and messagebus (Manually
if necessary), re-plug your PCMCIA card in, and you should see that it
now has the capabilities as mentioned above.

I'm not exactly sure if this is the right way to go about it, but it
seemed to work for me, in a fashion.

Wade Mealing