[Prism54-users] SMC2802W

[James Green]

Hiya.

This week, I bought an SMC2802W PCI wireless card, which claims to
support 802.11b and 802.11g. It looks like this, in lspci:

0000:00:0f.0 Network controller: Intersil Corporation Intersil ISL3890
[Prism GT/Prism Duette] (rev 01)

So I reckon that makes it a prism54 supported card, which sounds like
a good thing to me. Currently, I've tried the following to configure
it:

1) I downloaded the firmware from
http://prism54.org/~mcgrof/firmware/1.0.4.3.arm and saved it as
/usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/isl3890

2) Put the following in /etc/network/interfaces -
iface eth1 inet static
        address 192.168.0.17
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        gateway 192.168.0.1
        wireless_essid jnet
        wireless_mode managed
        wireless_key 686C6167686C616768484F4E4B

(I figure the risk of giving my key out on mailing lists is low, given
my location)

3) tried various repetitions of "ifconfig eth1 up" and "ifconfig eth1
down". When I put the interface up, lines appear in 'dmesg' , which I
have put online at http://www.jimbo.org.uk/junk/prism54.txt

4) After an ifconfig eth1 down, iwconfig reports the following:

eth1      NOT READY!  ESSID:off/any
          Mode:Managed  Channel:6  Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
          Tx-Power=31 dBm   Sensitivity=0/200
          Retry min limit:0   RTS thr=0 B   Fragment thr=0 B
          Encryption key:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

5) After an ifconfig eth1 up, iwconfig reports the following:

eth1      no wireless extensions.

My question, then, is this: what am I not doing in steps 1 and 2, and
how worried should I be about the messages in each of 3, 4 and 5? For
what it's worth, I'm running debian "sarge", and the stock debian
2.6.7 kernel image.

Modules loaded into the kernel are listed at
http://www.jimbo.org.uk/junk/modules.txt

Any ideas where I'm going wrong would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

James.
-- 
jkg at jimbo.org.uk | http://blog.jimbo.org.uk/ | PGP key ID 81AE1FF
Be careful when a loop exits to the same place from side and bottom.