FC4 with prism54 driver netgear wg511

Took me a day of googling to get it working, and have to combine other ppls' experiences for it to work, and I wouldn't wish this upon my enemy. But like everything linux, transparent complexity is much sweeter than blackbox dumbness.

My gf's laptop is a real old samsung P4. Got the netgear card and install the Linspire (when I mention penguin, she can only relate to alaska cruise vacation). It installed flawlessly, evthing works right off, but the debian repositories apt-get wouldn't do KDE, which is understandable. Then I try FC4 in it. Can't even go online with the eth0 ethernet.

At the boot screen, I saw the wireless card taking over the eth0 but wouldn't run, so the DHCP is just hanging there.Don't know in FC4 why the wireless alias is taking the eth0 and the somehow messed up the ethernet even. No sweat. Unplug the wireless card, goto the system setting > Network and try and just disable the wireless one and correct the ethernet to use eth0 (this works for me).

Then goto the /etc/modprobe.conf and make sure the alias for both the wireless and ethernet is what you want. I set etho to be ethernet.

Now once reboot, the eth0 should work. At this point, I'd fix the yum repositories (goto http://www.fedorafaq.org/ and grab that yum.conf , it's got most of the major repo, dries dag, and whatnot, works for me). and do update for kernel and whatever for KDE / gnome. This ensure you get the latest sys config scripts. (Who knows, the world richest linux distro might actually go and fix these kinda problem one day).

Then shutdown, put the card back in, reboot. You should see the card in hardware browser. Now we install the firmware like other poster henrik suggest:

-======================================================-
1.) First, check out that your wireless card is supported by www.prism54.org.

2.) Download the proper firmware add-on release. This is not a firmware update for the card, but a microcode add-on which has to be loaded everytime your system starts up. Your card firmware won´t be changed.
In my case, I took the 1.0.4.3.arm firmware add-on release.

3.) Check your pcmcia daemon is running from startup. If not, just type "chkconfig pcmcia on" an restart your system.

4.) Copy your firmware add-on to the /lib/firmware directory. The
directory already exists !
If the directory is not there, take a look at the firmware path stated in
the /etc/hotplug/firmware.agent script. In FC3 there is no need to
update the firmware agent at all by additional stuff from the
prism54.org page.


Example: /etc/hotplug/firmware.agent

----------------- snip ----------------
# directory of the firmware files
FIRMWARE_DIR=/lib/firmware
----------------- snap ----------------


5.) Rename your firmware add-on from "1.0.4.3.arm" to "isl3890".

6.) Edit your /etc/modprobe.conf. In my case, the wireless card points to eth1. Change the alias: alias eth1 islpci_cb

Example: /etc/modprobe.conf

------------- snip ---------
alias eth0 e100 # build-in ethernet adapter
alias eth1 islpci_cb # netgear wg511 pcmcia adapter
------------- snap ---------


7.) Restart your system and check with "lsmod" the existence of the prism54 driver.
-======================================================-

Then after restart, goto system tools>internet configuration Wizard, config your access point and such to match. NOTE: you have to apend '0x' in the front the HEX wep passphase.
and behold it actually works. Now I got both connection working, just need to make it looks as nice as linspire.

Bryan Tai