# 3Com 3CRWE62092A Wireless LAN PC card on Dell Latitude C400

## mattt

I first built and installed the pcmcia_cs package. I didn't do a plain

emerge as the source was needed later to compile the card driver.

ebuild /usr/portage/sys-apps/pcmcia-cs/pcmcia-cs-3.2.3-r1.ebuild fetch unpack compile install qmerge

This driver for this particular 3Com card is the same as the No Wire

Needed driver and the Swallow 550 & 1100 driver. It has good support

for the card security features. Get it from

http://www.xs4all.nl/~bvermeul/swallow/poldhu-0.2.13.tar.gz

and untar into /usr/src. 

Run make config, make all and make install. make all complained

about not being able to find the pcmcia sources. This was apparently important to

fix, I entered the path to source of the pcmcia-cs ebuild

(/var/tmp/portage/pcmcia-cs-3.2.3-r1/work/pcmcia-cs-3.2.3/) after the

message (the prompt for doing so isn't very clear here).

make install installed the drivers into

/lib/modules/{kern-version}/pcmcia along with the others that were

built by the pcmcia_cs package.

Next, appended the card definitions found in poldhu/config/poldhu.conf

to the /etc/pcmcia/config.opts file.

This:

modprobe pcmcia_core

modprobe i82365

modprobe ds

modprobe poldhu_cs

didn't work. I found problems getting the poldhu_cs driver to load, it kept

bombing out stating a 'Card Services version mismatch'. This proved to

be a pain, especially after not having any luck looking on google. You

may not have the same problem, it was probably just the way I ended up

building it (as this write up does not reflect the actual path I

followed by any means). To get round this issue i just edited

poldhu/clients/poldhu_cs.c and commented out lines 2750-2755 which 

were responsible for the particular error I was getting. After

recompiling the driver it loaded just fine.

The other issue I found was that my /usr/include/linux/wireless.h was

well out of date, v12 of Wireless Extensions when the latest is

currently v16. My solution, after much reading around on Jean

Tourrilhes site: 

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html

and elsewhere, was to download and build v26-pre7 of

wireless-tools. wireless-tools complain during build and iwconfig

complains during when the package has been compiled with an old

wireless.h. The wireless-tools tar comes with all versions of

wireless.h since v9 and it is just a matter of copying the latest one

to /usr/include/linux to get everything to compile ok. 

I must admit to having trouble getting gkrellm-wireless to work, I

suspect that /proc/net/wireless is not working correctly and this

probably has something to do with my hackery of wireless.h.

The last step was to configure /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts. I had to

comment out lines 45 and 46. I added in the card's first three hex

digits of it's MAC address, ESSID and KEY to the last case at the

bottom of the script.

I was then able to run /etc/init.d/pcmcia start. By checking

/var/run/stab I could see that the card had been detected.

Once the card was working I was able to give the card interface an ip

address and add a default gateway. 

This was my first try at getting wireless working under linux and the 

3Com card itself was a bit unique; so any comments greatly appreciated.

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## Spida

I have got this card, too and have similar, if not the same problems. Commenting out lines 2750-2755 of /poldhu/clients/poldhu.c fixed the "Card Services version mismatch"-Problem.  Thanks for that hint.

I didn't do the wireless-tools-part of your list, and I am still using pcmcia-cs-3.2.1-r3.

The Problems I have is that I have no clue how to configure the card, everything it takes from the wireless.opts file seems to be the ESSID, but neither the AP-Address, nor the channel, ...

Sometimes the iwconfig utility reports the transmit-power of the card set to 0dBm, sometimes it reports 14 dBm.

/proc/net/wireless gives me some kind of header from an empty table, I believe that this should not be empty, but I have *NO* experiences with wlan.

How should I go on?

Update pcmcia-cs to 3.2.3?

Update wireless-tools?

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## Spida

Ok, I updated pcmcia-cs to 3.2.3, and installed wireless-tools-26.pre7

Now I can select a channel, and have a TX-Power > 0.

The card seems to work, but I can't connect to the AP (at least I can't ping it, or anything beyond in wired net).

As I am a total Wlan newbie, can anybody tell me where I should start looking for my mistakes?

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## Spida

The Accesspoint is working fine, I have just tested it with another notebook. 

Now either my driver is not working, or my configuration is borked.

Can anybody help me to find out how to get this working?

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## dirtboy

I have that same card and updated the firmware from Windows to the latest version.  I am having great headaches with it too.  Try this command and see if you get the same error I do:

iwconfig eth1 ap any

That is supposed to setup the access point to be any found, but mine keeps saying "Operation not permitted".

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## Spida

iwconfig eth0 ap any gets me:

Error for wireless request "Set AP Address" (8B14) :

    SET failed for eth0: Operation not supported

Where did you get the firmware-update, did it help?

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## dirtboy

 *Spida wrote:*   

> iwconfig eth0 ap any gets me:
> 
> Error for wireless request "Set AP Address" (8B14) :
> 
>     SET failed for eth0: Operation not supported
> ...

 

 I found it on the 3com site.  Do a search under downloads for the model number.

I did find out from the pcmcia-cs guys that the TI 1250 Cardbus controller wasn't being detected correctly and I will be testing a beta version they gave me.  I'll post my findings after I try it out.  I have a ProStar 8885, which is the same as the Sager 8887, Alienware something or other, and a slew of others.  Clevo makes all these.

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## Spida

I updated my card just this morning. no change.

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## sancho5

I was able to successfully load support for this card using the instructions provided in this thread.  I documented the process in this HOWTO I wrote, hoping that it might be of help to someone. 

You can find the HOWTO here: http://www.sancho2k.net/filemgmt/singlefile.php?lid=34

DS

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