3com Pcmcia Wifi Card On Toshiba Tecra 8000 Not Starting

Hello,

I have installed Suse Linux 10 on my Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptop with a 3Com Wifi PCMCIA card. The wifi card is properly detected during the installation (3Com 3CRWE154G72 with the Prism54 chipset). I have entered all the information on my network (such as WEP keys, SSID, etc.).
However, the card will just not start up. Even after a reboot and checking everything in Yast it will not start.

Considering the fact that the card was automatically detected during the installation I am assuming that the correct drivers have been loaded. Do I now need to enable someting to get the card started ?

I am very new to Linux (have plenty of windows experience, but that probably doesn't help here ) and I would appreciate some help.

Thanks,
Idso Brouwer.

did you set it for on boot when you set the card up in yast ? if that doesn't work, open a console,su to root & issue the ifup command to start it, i.e.

ifup wlan0 ( replace wlan0 with what you set the card up as )

andy

Andy,

Yes, I set it for on boot startup in Yast

When I run ifup eth0 I get the following messages:

eth0 device: 3Com 3CRWE154G72 (Rev 01)
eth0 configuration: wlan-bus-pci-0000:05:00.0
eth0 warning: wpa_supplicant already running on interface
SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such files or directory
Strating DHCP client Deamon on Eth0 ............No IP Address yet....backgrounding.
SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such files or directory
ERROR: Cannot enable interface eth0
ERROR: interface eth0 is not up.

What to do next ?

Thanks,
Idso.

did you set it for on boot when you set the card up in yast ? if that doesn't work, open a console,su to root & issue the ifup command to start it, i.e.

ifup wlan0 ( replace wlan0 with what you set the card up as )

andy
[/b]

I have in the mean time found out that a driver file called isl3890 was needed in etc/firmware.

At this moment the card is at least starting up and seems to be l;ooking for a connection. However, it restes about every 2 minutes.

The message log says the following:

eth0: caught WPA supplicant set WPA IE request
eth0: WPA attachement was set
prism54_hostapd - len=48
eth0: caught WPA drop unencrypted request

I am not using WPA, but am using WEP.

Any idea ?

Thanks,
Idso.

I have got this card.
The card has no hardware-firmware.
The firmware is downloded evertime the card activates.
The trick to handle this used to be to modprobe firmware_loader.
But newer kernels seem to lack this module.

Try as root in a console to enter:
modprobe firmware_loader

If it works you can automamate this command via Yast.
Open "/etc/sysconfig Editor"
Go to System, Kernel, MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT
and fill in the field with "modprobe firmware_loader"
(Don't write the qoutation-marks just the text).

The file isl3890 can be made from the installationdisk that came with the card.

The files name is "3C154G72.arm" and you will find it on the CD in the folder "/Driver/3CRWE154G72".

Rename this file to "isl3890" and replace the one in /etc/firmware, if you are not sure it is the right one.
(The old file in /etc/firmware can be renamed isl3890.OLD, if you will need it in the future).

This may even work with WPA.