LinuxOrinicoWLANDriver

The Linux Orinoco Wireless LAN driver supports many chipsets (see the Hardware Compatability List for full details). I have got a Netgear MA401 and an unnamed OEM wireless card working with this driver. The Netgear is well supported and there's plenty of documentation to get it going. The unnamed OEM card, naturally, does not have such good documentation. However, it seems to be compatable with the Netgear (at least, On Windows, both cards quite happily use each others wireless utilities).

The unnamed OEM card came from SEG Communications in the UK and has a part/model number of XI325H (details). Since it's a high power card, its a little more expensive than other cards, such as the Netgear.

Initially, I found the Linux PCMCIA "cardmgr" reported (into /var/log/messages) that the card was unsupported, and had the following information (also available once the card is working via "cardctl"):

Product Info: "IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN/PC Card", ""
Manufacturer ID: 0xd601, 0x0005
Function: 6 (network)

I found that adding an entry to /etc/pcmcia/config made the card work fine (once the Orinoco driver is available as a kernel module):

card "IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN/PC Card"

  manfid 0xd601, 0x0005<br />
  bind &quot;orinoco_cs&quot;11

Restarting the PCMCIA subsystem (/etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia stop; /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia start) was all I needed to do. Of course, for wireless options, /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts needs to be edited.

About the Card

Apart from a manufacturer ID of &quot;0xd601, 0x0005&quot;, there's not a great deal of information about the XI325H. The card, CD and box have absolutely no manufacturer markings on them, the only slight give away is the FCC notice indicating the card was manufactured in Taiwan. I looked up the hardware address on the 39 Standards web site and found:

00-60-B3 (hex) Z-COM, INC.
0060B3 (base 16) Z-COM, INC.

                             7F-2, NO.9, [[PROSPERITY]] 1ST RD.<br />
                             SCIENCE-BASED [[INDUSTRIAL]] PARK<br />
                             [[HSINCHU]]<br />
                             TAIWAN, [[REPUBLIC]] OF [[CHINA]]19

It turns out have a website, which does have information, and does confirm the chipset is Prism-2.5 (which is listed as supported by the Orinoco driver).

Incidentally, along my travels around the 'net I found someone saying that there were two types of Netgear MA401 around, one which worked and one which didn't. If it's any consequence, my Netgear reports itself as the following (when asked with &quot;cardctl&quot;):

Product Info: &quot;NETGEAR MA401RA Wireless PC&quot;, &quot;Card&quot;, &quot;ISL37300P&quot;, &quot;Eval-RevA&quot;
Manufacturer ID: 0x000b, 0x7300
Function: 6 (network)

This works fine with the Orinoco driver.