[Prism54-users] success with 3com 3CRWE154G72

[Kai Vehmanen]

Hi,

first of all, big thanks to all prism54 developers for excellent work on 
these drivers!

I found the archives of this list a valuable source of information, so
let's contribute something back.

I spend quite a lot of time comparing different WLAN cards and the level
of Linux support provided. Luckily I ended up buying a 3Com 3CRWE154G72
802.11g pccard. It seems that most of the cards available for purchase at
the moment (at least here in Finland) have very poor Linux support
(per-kernel-release binary drivers, etc, etc).

Anyway, I got the abovementioned 3Com card to work fine on my Toshiba 1620
laptop with the prism54 drivers. Some details:

- 06:00.0 Network controller: 3Com Corporation: Unknown device 6001 (rev 01)
        Subsystem: 3Com Corporation: Unknown device 6001
- vanilla 2.6.0 kernel
    - compiled with 2.95.3
- prism54 drivers - 20040106 cvs snapshot
    - compiled with 2.95.3
- SMC2804 802.11g WLAN AP
- prism54 firmware v1.0.4.3

I've had some minor troubles (makefiles needed some editing, firmware
loading oopses every now and then, wrong version of iwtools), but nothing 
serious (and yup, I'll post a bug report if these persist).

I also got 128bit WEP to work with the prism54 drivers. With the WEP
enabled, I get steady 20.48Mbit/s speeds on ftp downloads. Not bad at 
all! :)

Anyway, hopefully this information is useful - especially to those of you
reading the archives trying to figure out which WLAN card to buy.

--
 http://www.eca.cx
 Audio software for Linux!