[Prism54-users] Success on Medion MD40100 laptop !

[Ronald van der Meer]

Hi,

Finally got it to work in linux on my Medion MD40100 laptop!
Now I don't have to boot windows anymore to go wireless, I'm actually
posting this with a wireless link :)

In windows on this laptop a special wireless button has to be pressed to
make a special wireless led light up. After this the wireless card can
be used. Because all my attempt to make this card work in linux failed,
I suspected this behavior may be hardwired in this laptop. Because this
laptop has a lot of characteristics in common with some acer laptops I
started hacking on the acer hotkey driver. I could get it to turn on the
led on loading the module. After this the card finally responds to
iwconfig commands.

I put my hacked acer-hotkey driver online at :

http://home.conceptsfa.nl/~revdmeer/md40100/acerhk-0.5.0-pre4_with_ugly_led_on_hack_for_md40100.tar.bz2

just unpack it, cd into the newly created directory, type 'make' and
'insmod acerhk.o verbose=4 poll=1' and the led should light up.
After this the wireless card responds as expected.

Even the gnome wifi applet works nicely, 'rmmod prism54' still totally
locks up my machine though.

For completeness sake my lspci -vvvn output, maybe it can be added to
the supported card section. I wouldn't know how to call this card, as it
probably isn't sold seperatly.

03:06.0 Class 0280: 1260:3890 (rev 01)
        Subsystem: 17cf:0014
        Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV+ VGASnoop-
ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B-
        Status: Cap+ 66Mhz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort-
<TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
        Latency: 80 (2500ns min, 7000ns max), cache line size 08
        Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 11
        Region 0: Memory at d2004000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable)
[size=8K]
        Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 1
                Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1+ D2+ AuxCurrent=0mA
PME(D0+,D1+,D2+,D3hot+,D3cold+)
                Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-
 

Thanks to everybody who is involved in coding this driver, keep up the
good work !

Ronald