Identifying the chipset in your wireless card.

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kirk
Posts: 1553
Joined: Fri 11 Nov 2005, 19:04
Location: florida

Identifying the chipset in your wireless card.

#1 Post by kirk »

To use a linux driver with your wireless card, the first step is to find out what chipset it uses. Go to the linked page below and choose the manufacturer of your wireless card, then click show. After you find the chipset of your card, you can search the form for a driver or compile one your self.

http://linux-wless.passys.nl/

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kelewax
Posts: 41
Joined: Fri 04 Nov 2005, 16:26
Location: Nigeria

#2 Post by kelewax »

Hi,
Thanks for this post. It's really very useful.
Which of the favours of your Lord can you deny?

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yorkiesnorkie
Posts: 504
Joined: Mon 04 Jun 2007, 13:11
Location: George's Island

card identification in the console

#3 Post by yorkiesnorkie »

For a pcmcia cards you can get information on the chip by opening the console and typing "cardctl ident " at the command prompt, then press enter. This will help identify the correct driver to load in Puppy's connection wizard. e.g.

Code: Select all

 # cardctl ident 
Socket 0: 
  no product info available 
Socket 1: 
  product info: "Realtek", "Rtl8139" 
  manfid: 0x0000, 0x024c 
  function: 6 (network)
Pay attention to the line which has "manfid: 0x0000, 0x024c' on it as you can use this string to search the net find the chip should the line with the product info be incorrect. My pcmcia card identified the chip as "Rtl8139" which was not actually correct. I had help from Tempestuous who pointed out this discrepancy and identified the correct driver to use. I needed to use the "r8180" driver listed in the wireless wizard to get a working connection.

Yorkiesnorkie

MrWho
Posts: 6
Joined: Thu 20 Mar 2008, 08:19
Location: Coimbra, Portugal

#4 Post by MrWho »

I suspect that table could be wrong sometimes, because many times the manufacturer changes the specs but maintain the same model number.

I'll give you my example: I have an Allied Telesyn WCL007 wifi card. According to that site, it should use the hostap driver, but in fact the only driver I could get it to work with was the bcm43xx (which puppy in fact autodetects).

Unfortunately I can't physically check the chip on the card since it has a big metal box covering almost everything.

Just my two cents...

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