March of the Wireless Penguin

March 12, 2006

Hardware

Dell Latitude C600 laptop (Windows 2000, Fedora Core 4)
Belkin F5D6231-4 802.11b Router
Belkin F5D6020 802.11b Notebook Card

Getting it Working

Indentification

The Belkin card was a version 3 card, which really is based on the Realtek chipset.  The cardctl program is not very helpful; it fails to identify the card. I happened to know what the card was based on my earlier work with RedHat Linux 9.

Obtain the Driver

The Linux driver for the 2.6 kernel is available from the RealTek website (http://www.realtek.com.tw), however I was not able to get to compile and link cleanly with Fedora Core 4.  A better driver is available from the "rtl8180-sa2400 Linux kernel driver" project at Sourceforge (http://rtl8180-sa2400.sourceforge.net/). One change needs to be made to the rtl8180_core.c file:
*** r8180_core.c.orig        2005-04-12 08:39:56.000000000 -0400
--- r8180_core.c             2006-03-09 19:32:59.000000000 -0500
***************
*** 3630,3636 ****

        if (!(pmem_flags & IORESOURCE_MEM)) {
                DMESG("%s: region #1 not a MMIO resource, aborting",
!                     pdev->slot_name);
                goto fail;
        }

--- 3630,3636 ----

        if (!(pmem_flags & IORESOURCE_MEM)) {
                DMESG("%s: region #1 not a MMIO resource, aborting",
!                     pci_name(pdev));
                goto fail;
        }


Configuration Files

You could choose to populate /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opt with the networks you frequently use.

Starting the Driver

I created a script which configures the network:
#!/bin/sh

cd /root/rtl8180-0.21
./module_load
ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
iwconfig wlan0 essid YOUR_ESSID

dhclient wlan0

Now What?

So it works, and that is great! I have not seen any problems with this configuration.