[Prism54-devel] Netgear WG511

[Feyd]

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004 10:26:38 +0000
Dominik Strehlke <dominik at strehlke.info> wrote:

> Hey Carl,
> 
> On Tuesday 09 November 2004 09:12, Carl Myers wrote:
> > I recently purchased a Netgear WG511 card online, hoping to replace my
> > broadcom chipset with one that has native linux driver support.  Alas,
> > it was impossible to tell from the order page, and I didn't even know
> > there were versions which the driver support doesn't work on (namely,
> > the newer v3.0 "made-in-china" ones).
> >
> > I am writing to ask for confirmation that the drivers are known to not
> > work with this card, and ask if any known workarounds exist.  
> 
> I have the same problem. Looking in the prism54 forum it turned out that we 
> are not the only ones. Concerning workarounds I was proposed to try 
> ndiswrapper which allows you to use Windows driver binaries to get the card 
> working on Linux. It did not work for me as well. If you figure something 
> out, please let us know.

There are two kinds of the cards, FullMac and SoftMac. The FullM firmware
does the 802.11 management, the SoftMac leaves it to the driver.
The SoftMac cards don't work with the FullMac firmware. I guess they have
smaller memory, as the FullMac firmware size is about 90Kb and the SoftMac
about 30Kb.
Our driver works with the FullMac firmware only, the SoftMac has different
API. But it could may be learned from the USB dongles, as they use the
SoftMac firmware and it is possible to sniff the USB traffic. If you want
to experiment, compare the PCI and USB drivers, see http://jbnote.free.fr
for most recent versions.

Feyd