ACX100 Kernel Modules

[John]

Darren Critchley wrote:
> Hello,
> 
>    I just installed Ubuntu the other day and have been working with it 
> quite a bit. I have tried two machines, the first was a Duron 1.3gig 
> with built video, etc and it worked fine except for the X in the middle 
> of the screen (which I have already found the posts that say how to 
> correct that)
> 
>    And the second machine is an IBM Thinkpad 390X, which almost 
> everything worked (the third mouse button doesn't seem to work, but I 
> have not had time to work with it). Anyways, as with all laptops, pcmcia 
> is always fun, particularly in the wireless area. I have three wireless 
> cards, a dlink 650 v2 which is one of the originals and is well 
> supported, an SMC 2632W v2 (atmel chipset) which is not as well 
> supported, and a Dlink 650+ which is not supported (well barely).
> 
>    So I got the SMC running merely by adding the wlan-ng from Synaptic 
> and that worked great.
>    The DWL 650+ took more work, I had to install the acx100 drivers 
> (acx100.sourceforge.net), now I notice that there is an older acx100 
> kernel module installed already (I could not get it to work, but I see 
> in the archives that someone else has).
> 
> My question is, which version of the acx100 is this, and do the 
> developers have any plans to go to the latest acx100 module which has 
> many new features? Or should this question be directed to the dev list?
> 
> Since installing this module, the 650+ works, but the pcmcia slot does 
> not behave as it should, and it takes a very long time to activate the 
> card, is this normal behaviour when using a windows firmware in Linux?


The Dlink + cards are good ones to avoid as the chipset manufacturer 
keeps secret all the info necessary to write drivers for its products.


To the extent this driver works at all is due to the reverse-engineering 
skills of the authors.

Since you have one, you can also try ndiswrapper which is a wrapper for 
NDIS drives (funny that) and use the Windows drivers.

I was in a shop the other day where there were some Dlink wireless cards 
on sale. Some were labelled "atheros."

I'm glad the chipset is becoming a selling feature, I'd be moderately 
comfortable buying one of those.