# orinoco minipci and wireless

## BassDemon

I just put gentoo on a toshiba satellite 5205-S119 that has a orinoco minipci wireless card. It's running the 2.6 kernel. Basically, it seems that it's just not recognizing the card at all. I have a sony vaio that also has an orinoco minipci card and all i had to do to get it working was to load the orinoco_pci module. Then iwconfig could immediately see the device. 

For the toshiba I've loaded the orinoco_pci module and iwconfig does not even recognize it exists. 

iwconfig:

```
eth0      no wireless extensions.

lo        no wireless extensions.
```

absolutely nothing about a wireless device

After scouring the forums I've added ISA support to the kernel in case it didn't find all the IRQ's. This hasn't changed the situation. Any ideas why I can't even see the card?

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## metalac

you should try removing pcmcia support from kernel and use pcmcia-cs modules.  Also make sure to compile wireless support under Network Devices in kernel.  There is an indepth tutorial, use the search function.

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## BassDemon

Already looked through all the tutorials I could find. And have tried removing pcmcia support from kernel and using pcmcia-cs. Still no luck. Same results.

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## molander

I also have this same card on my HP laptop and I have not had any problems with 2.4.20+ or 2.6.x ...

Anyways, does the device get detected on startup and assigned to eth0 or is that another card that you have? 

Does it show up with `lspci`?

```
00:0a.0 Network controller: Harris Semiconductor Prism 2.5 Wavelan chipset (rev 01)
```

If it doesn't show up there then the kernel is not even seeing the card let alone assigning a driver to communicate with it. That would mean something is either wrong with the card or the slot.

Have your tried swapping cards with your working laptop? I know with wireless cards the chipsets change a lot wrt version numbers and they are not always backwards compatible with their drivers.

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## Dracnor

Try this: under  -Bus options (PCI, PCMCIA, EISA, MCA, ISA)  ---> PCMCIA/CardBus support  --->

```
<M> PCMCIA/CardBus support                                      

<M> CardBus yenta-compatible bridge support
```

Device Drivers  --->Networking support  --->PCMCIA network device support  --->

```
[*] PCMCIA network device support
```

Device Drivers  --->Networking support  --->Wireless LAN (non-hamradio)  --->

```
[*] Wireless LAN drivers (non-hamradio) & Wireless Extensions

<M>   Hermes chipset 802.11b support (Orinoco/Prism2/Symbol)

<M>   Hermes PCMCIA card support
```

recompile and reboot with new kernel.  now load the module yenta_socket and possibly orinoco/orinoco_cs

```
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge pcmcia-cs
```

and then start up pcmcia

```
/etc/init.d/pcmcia start
```

**Note that you may have to include more modules than what is listed here.  Hopefully this helps though.

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## molander

 *Dracnor wrote:*   

> Try this: under  -Bus options (PCI, PCMCIA, EISA, MCA, ISA)  ---> PCMCIA/CardBus support  --->
> 
> ```
> <M> PCMCIA/CardBus support                                      
> 
> ...

 

I beleive his card is a miniPCI card not a PCMCIA. If so, the PCMCIA drivers will have no affect as this card resides on a different bus.  Unless I am missing something or some weird workaround...

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## latexer

 *molander wrote:*   

> 
> 
> I beleive his card is a miniPCI card not a PCMCIA. If so, the PCMCIA drivers will have no affect as this card resides on a different bus.  Unless I am missing something or some weird workaround...

 

some laptops and cards use a funky PCMCIA bridge for the minipci slot. Quite a few of the dells do this, so the card actually shows up on the "3rd pcmcia slot" and use the orinoco_cs driver.

As for 2.6, use the kernel PCMCIA stuff and install the ~x86 pcmcia-cs to get the userland tools (with /usr/src/linux pointing to the 2.6 kernel)(if you don't have pcmcia-cs already installed against a 2.4 kernel) . good luck.

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## BassDemon

Thank you all very much! Dracnor you're post fixed it.

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## BassDemon

heh....make that: Dracnor YOUR post fixed it.  :Smile: 

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## Dracnor

 *BassDemon wrote:*   

> heh....make that: Dracnor YOUR post fixed it. 

 

Glad to hear it  :Smile:   Do you know what part you were missing before?  I had trouble getting stuff to load properly without the yenta_socket module.  That was the key for me...never had to load this module with the 2.4 series kenel, that's why I had such a hard time the first time I tried to get pcmcia working.

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## BassDemon

Actually I bet it was the yenta_socket module. The rest of it i've tried before.  I couldn't even get my orinoco card working on my sony with the 2.4 kernel at all. Switch to the 2.6 kernel and all I had to do was load the module and it worked.

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## tom_p

Hi

 *BassDemon wrote:*   

> I just put gentoo on a toshiba satellite 5205-S119 that has a orinoco minipci wireless card. It's running the 2.6 kernel. Basically, it seems that it's just not recognizing the card at all. I have a sony vaio that also has an orinoco minipci card and all i had to do to get it working was to load the orinoco_pci module. Then iwconfig could immediately see the device. 
> 
> For the toshiba I've loaded the orinoco_pci module and iwconfig does not even recognize it exists. 
> 
> 

 

For the MiniPCI-Card, you need the orinoco_cs module. So include it in your kernel as module, emerge pcmcia-cs (with yenta-socket as pcmcia-driver), load pcmcia-cs and it should work. 

cu Thomas

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