[ale] Wireless weirdness

[Joseph A Knapka]

Hi folks,

Just a strange story:

Back when I had Slack 7.1 installed on my laptop, my Netgear
MA401 wireless card worked fine with the wvlan_cs.o driver
in the pcmcia package. Then, when I installed Slack 8, nothing
would convince that card to work with the wvlan_cs driver,
so at the recommendation of some ALE'r I installed the
wlan-ng package, which contains a new driver for Prism2
cards. That worked great, I even had WEP working, FWIW.

The plot thickens. A couple days ago I received a nice refurb
Dell 2600 laptop, which came preinstalled with WinXP. I decided
to see if the MA401, which was useless on my old laptop w/NT4,
would work under XP. I fought with the XP drivers and configuration 
tools for a while, and eventually got it working. I had to change
some wireless options on my access point to make that work, but I
was careful to return it to the saved configuration when I was
done fooling with the XP box.

But now, the card now absolutely refuses to work under
the wlan-ng driver on the Slack 8 box! What happened?
Did the XP box make some permanent change to the card
configuration? I fought with this for hours before
hitting upon the solution: I threw away the wlan-ng
driver and returned to wvlan_cs.o, which now works like
a charm!

This one of the few times I've ever been totally
mystified by an apparently-software-related problem
under linux.

Cheers,

-- Joe


---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.