Pesky Laptop Wireless PCMCIA

[dwainsworld]

Hi,

I have a dual bood fedora/windoze installatio on an IBM P500 laptop.

I have tried different wireless PCMCIA cards in it with no success. Firstly I tried a bilionton brand, and then a netgear card. I have been using the GUI bits and pieces in KDE to try to find it with no luck.

Has anyone else had any success to get wireless PCMCIA cards to work in a similar situation and if so please help me with some pointers.

FANX

Dwain.

[countach44]

I haven't but I know you can use the windows drivers with ndiswrapper-
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

[mcdougrs]

Ok last time I knew, there was little to know support for one of the chipsets used in wireless cards. I forget which chipset it was. But if you can post which brand AND model we can figure out which chipset they are using and then we can get you on the right path.

<edit>
The not very supported chipset is the RealTek chipset.
The most widely supported chipset is the Prizm and Prizm II chipset

Visit here for a table of wifi card manufaturers and the chipsets used
</edit>

[dwainsworld]

The card is a bilionton cbwlrp-b (that's the part number!!).

I have also tried netgear card unknown type.

My research leads me to believe that the card is a prizm II card. I have fedora core 1 running on both the laptop and a desktop - the desktop just works with the prizm II card that I am using in it although it is a PCI card.

I am guessing that the problem is with the fact that it is a PCMCIA card ???

Regards,

Dwain.

[mcdougrs]

LOL!!! Where did you get this card from?!?! I didn't even see it on that list. OK a dumb question BUT do/did either of those cards work within Windows? If not then MAYBE your PCMCIA slot is bad.

<edit>
Found the website... bad news, well not BAD but not the best news, the chipset is RealTek RTL8180L for that card man! So try and look up some info on getting the RealTek chipsets working. :-\ Good luck!!!!
</edit>

[mcdougrs]

Try here for the RealTek driver installation help.

OR

Try here for the ndiswrapper installation help

Give those a shot. See they help out at all.

[dwainsworld]

Thanks for the poingers Izan, I will be looking further in to it this week. Sorry for the delayed reply!!