Re: Orinoco_cs WiFi under kernel-2.6.30

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sun, 2009-09-13 at 02:02 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> My classic Orinoco Gold PCMCIA card has not been working
> under Fedora/KDE (with WEP) for some time.
> Does anyone have this card working under Fedora?
> It works perfectly under Windows XP.
> 
> I see in /var/log/messages that
> the firmware agere_sta_fw.bin cannot be found;
> but if this file is in fact required
> I don't understand why it is not provided with the orinoco_cs module?

Originally it wasn't provided with the module because the license that
the firmware was released under only allowed you (as the user) to get it
directly from Agere or on the CD that came with your card.  Your Linux
distribution could not legally repackage it and give it to you.

I think that was fixed though, and there is now a legally downloadable
firmware available here:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/dwmw2/linux-firmware.git;a=tree

(click the "blob" link next to agere_sta_fw.bin and put that file
into /lib/firmware)

> Rather frighteningly, I read this remark from Dan Williams,
> who seems to be one of the two orinoco_cs developers:
> "Since the WE-18 support in orinoco is so new, 
> I'm not really surprised that 
> it could be failing for WEP or open networks."

That was long ago; orinoco is probably better now, but I haven't tested
it in a while.  It's worth a shot.  Of course, you wont' be able to
connect to 802.11g speeds since no orinoco cards can handle that, but at
least you may get something.  If not, we can debug it.

Dan