Systems is a Pentium 2 Laptop, using a Lucent Orinoco Silver card. I booted the 1.4_rc4 livecd using gentoo dopcmcia. The system booted, initialized pcmcia and auto-configured the pcmcia interfaces. Tried to bring up the interface, it fails, looking at the loaded modules, prism2_cs was loaded. I tried to manually load orinoco_cs but it failed with unresolved symbols. /lib/modules/2.4.20-xfs-r2/pcmcia/orinoco_cs.o: unresolved symbol orinoco_interrupt_R8ca3e787 and so on. I tried using smp dopcmcia but the smp kernel doesn't have orinoco_cs as a module at all. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot off livecd 2. modprobe orinoco_cs Actual Results: It fails with unresolved symbols Expected Results: the expected result was loading the orinoco_cs wireless driver
I am having this problem as well. On boot, the LiveCD loads the prism2_cs drivers (presumably via hotplug) when it should be loading the orinoco_cs drivers. Attempting to use iwconfig to change any of the card's settings always fails. I've tried rmmoding the prism2_cs and related drivers, then modprobing the orinoco_cs driver in its place. The orinoco_cs driver loads but doesn't latch on to the wireless card (so no interface appears). From my experience this happens both on 1.4 and 1.4rc4, so I'm assuming it happens on rc1-rc3 as well. It seems like it's probably related to Gentoo-specific modifications made to the kernel packaged in 1.4 and 1.4rc4, but that's just my preliminary guess. I've been able to install Slackware correctly on this laptop, which uses stock 2.4.20 and 2.4.21 kernels, with no problems of this type.
This is still broken on the 2004.1 LiveCD. I was able to get around it by executing: modprobe hermes modprobe orinoco modprobe orinoco_cs For some reason, executing all these separately works, whereas just doing "modprobe orinoco_cs" alone yields a number of "unresolved symbol" errors. Is it possible some patch to the kernel caused things to get borked in these drivers? Or maybe module dependency information is wrong somewhere? Either way, it appears that the LiveCD doesn't ship with the "iwconfig" tool, so there's no way for me to connect to anything other than an insecure network...which for me, means a wireless install is out of the question. Bleh. I consider this mess to be something of a blocker. Am I the only one who wants to do a wireless install of Gentoo? Apparently this is just something Gentoo can't support at the moment.
Tried 2004.2?
2004.2 loads the prism2_cs module (and related modules) automatically, which is a step in the right direction. The linux-wlan people claim I should be using the orinoco_cs driver, but their prism2_cs module still tries to claim the driver whenever pcmcia hotplugging is involved. For more info check http://www.linux-wlan.org/docs/wlan_adapters.html.gz and search for model "3crwe737a". I've played around some with "/etc/conf.d/wlancfg-DEFAULT" but haven't been able to get the prism2_cs drivers to pick up a connection correctly. This could be a Gentoo config problem or it could be a prism2_cs driver problem (prism2_cs drivers have in the past acted *very* funky with this particular card; I normally only use orinoco_cs) or it could be a PEBKAC problem. I also tried "rmmod pcmcia_cs ; rmmod p80211 ; modprobe orinoco_cs", but the orinoco_cs driver won't attach to my network card. I assume this is a pcmcia hotplugging issue, but I'm not sure how to fix it. One thing I noticed that was a bit confusing. If you do a "find / | grep wlan" there are linux-wlan files all over the place. There are config files in "/etc/conf.d", hotplug-related files in "/etc/pcmcia" (if I remember right), and an init script in "/etc/rc.d/init.d". When I used linux-wlan in the past, my understanding was that I was supposed to make changes to "/etc/conf.d/wlancfg-DEFAULT", then restart the wlan service, but when I run "/etc/rc.d/init.d/wlan restart" the init spits out a bunch of strange messages. In addition, it feels like the wlan init script should be in "/etc/init.d" instead...is there any reason it (and kudzu's init script) have been relocated? It might be beneficial if a "wireless install" section found its way into the Gentoo install guide. Nothing fancy, just something that said "edit this file like so, run this script, and you should have wireless access".
I'll be honest. I've used wireless (and Orinoco Gold) cards to install Gentoo. Here's what I did... #1. forget wlan-ng #2. boot *without* dopcmcia #3. edit /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts to suit my needs (SSID and KEY) #4. /etc/init.d/pcmcia start #5. continue install
OK, I have a network connection. Here's what I did: (1) Boot with no parameters (e.e. without dopcmcia) (2) Edited "/etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.conf" with vim, used regex "1,167s/prism2_cs/orinoco_cs/g" to change all occurrences of "prism2_cs" to "orinoco_cs". (3) Ran "/etc/init.d/pcmcia start" (4) Used iwconfig to assign essid and wep key to my card (5) Used dhcpcd to acquire an IP address A suggestion: the LiveCD should probably not use the linux-wlan drivers by default. From my experience they've always been difficult to configure, and at least in this particular situation prism2_cs was bound to a card that it claims not to support.
Closing then.
