[Prism54-users] Knoppix 3.7 and SMC2835W V2

[Pavel Epifanov]

All,

Let me share a success story.

What I did:

= attempted to upgrade kernel 2.4.24 to 2.6.*
I'm on Debian Woody. So some new packages had to be installed. It took me 
couple of day because most of them should to be re-compiled for this stable 
distribution.

= SMC2835W V2 with prism54 driver v 1.0.2 STOPPED working for 2.4.* kernels
Messages about timeouts after firmware loaded and reset triggered

= spent every evening for almost 2 weeks trying get a solution
Nothing helped. I decided that my card got broken. And another Prism2 Wifi 
card worked well.

= Downloaded Knoppix 3.7 PCWelt edition from ED2K P2P network
And my  card worked just fine (!) when booting from CDROM with kernel 2.6.7 
and prism54 driver 1.2 and firmware 1.0.4.3. So far I could not find a 
difference between my Debian installation and Knoppix 3.7 which is also 
Debian based. Even copying some packages does not help. Magic again or just 
too complex for me?

Lessons to learn:
1) Make a backup right before you start playing. I have one but about 6 
month old.
2) When Prism54 is working, do not touch anything. It is very sensitive to 
any package one could imagine. Don't think you could easily revert changes 
(as I thought wrongly).
3) When you decide that hardware does not work anymore - try latest version 
of Knoppix. The one I've tested contains many recent drivers for WiFi cards 
including some utilities like wavemon or kismet. Youself you could spend 
hours to get the similar packages compiled on old stable Linux distribution.

Pavel.