[Prism54-devel] WG511: Taiwan VS China issue?

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 02:21:53PM +0200, Benoit Panizzon wrote:
> Hi Prism Developers.
> 
> I posted this problem a while ago on the users mailinglist but nobody was able 
> to help or answer my question yet.
> 
> So I just wanted to know if somebody could confirm this problem.
> 
> Apparently NetGear has moved the production of the WG511 Cards from Taiwan to 
> China this year.
> Everything else like the PCI-id of the cards are the same.
> 
> The problem is, that the China-WG511 Cards do not seam to be working with the 
> actual prism54 driver and firmware from the website and the Windows drivers 
> packages do not seam to contain a separate .arm file anymore.
> 
> At least any reports from working Cards I got until today were about 'made in 
> taiwan' (below the serial number) cards.
> 
> Is this a known fact? Did some of you got a WG511 china card working?
> 
> If not...
> Does somebody know if the china WG511 will get supported somewhen or if there 
> is a short hack to make it working?
> 
> Somebody told me it is an issue of 'soft mac' versus 'full mac' but this issue 
> does only seam to apply to USB nic's and not to PCCard nics as I was told by 
> others.

Yes -- what probably happened was that Netgear started buying Conexan't
SoftMAC chipsets over the FullMAC ones. The manufacturers should have
changed PCI IDs when they do this and I don't know why they didn't. How
about the subsystem IDs, can you give your lspci -v -n output? And can
someone with a working WG511 give their lspci -v -n output too? Thanks.

The SoftMAC chipsets may be supported at some point soon now that
Conexant is now working with Prism54 again.

	Luis

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