ARGH!!!! STUPID WIRELESS!

[Warren Togami]

Just when I thought I finally got the wireless working, it mysteriously
stopped working in Linux.

Here's the entire story...
1. Bought SMC2602W card against Brian Chee's recommendations because I was
impatient and didn't want to wait for a decent card shipped from the
mainland.
2. Tried it plug it into a free PCI slot of my Linux firewall Pentium
450MHz.  Spent over 15 hours trying to get the linux-wlan-ng drivers
compiled and working.
3. Eight kernel recompiles, fifty something kernel panics, twenty something
PCI card slot swappings later, I discovered the orinoco_plx driver included
in the latest Red Hat kernel and wireless tools.  It *almost* worked.  (BTW,
ext3 is a lifesaver.)
4. Put wireless PCI card into another computer (Pentium 533MHz) and it
suddenly worked with the orinoco_plx driver.
5. Put wireless PCI card back into the firewall.  Didn't work with the
orinoco_plx driver.
6. I thought "Oh boy!  Maybe the older Pentium 450MHz couldn't handle
another PCI card in bus-mastering mode because it has two shared ISA slots.
I just have to move my firewall onto this Pentium 533MHz and I'm all set."
7. The Pentium533MHz had an ATI Radeon 7200 64MB DDR AGP video card that
mysteriously stopped working on a Mid-Pac high-end multimedia machine.  I
was trying to figure out what is wrong with it.  It somehow crashes the
computer whenever you go into anything higher than 8bit color or 640x480
mode.  The Pentium450MHz firewall had a crappy S3 Trio32 PCI video card with
1MB of VRAM.
8. The 533Mhz now the firewall didn't need a possibly broken high end video
card, so I put the crappy PCI card in there along with two network cards.
Two hours later I had all the software loaded and all settings transferred.
9. The stupid wireless card wouldn't work.  Same behavior as in the old
firewall.  Link establishes, but I can't send any packets through.
10. After another hour of PCI card swapping and resource checking, I had a
strange idea and swapped the video card back.  It worked!  WTF!
11. Swapped in an ATI RageXP 32MB AGP card.  Wireless still broken.
12. Swapped in a nVidia Geforce2 MX400 AGP card.  Wireless still broken.
13. Put the Radeon card back in.  Wireless works again.


The level of absurdity here is extreme.  I need a technical explanation for
this or I will go insane.

I need ice cream...

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com