Debian GNU/Linux and Harris Semiconductor Prism 2.5 Wavelan Support

I was wrong when I mentioned before that the integrated wireless on my Thinkpad G40 wasn't supported under Linux. Turns out it is. I'm still struggling to get it working but I do believe it is supported.

Trying to get it working, I first tried the wlan-ng driver which claims to support this built-in, PCI wireless device. Debian comes with the wlan-ng driver and utilities prepackaged. You must get the linux-wlan-ng package, along with the appropriate linux-wlan-ng-modules-* package for your kernel. If you use a custom kernel, you must apt-get source linux-wlan-ng in your /usr/src/modules directory and make sure to build it when you build your kernel. See my page on building a custom kernel under debian with make-kpkg for instructions on how to build modules (like pcmcia-cs-modules and linux-wlan-ng-modules).

This almost worked except that the prism2_pci driver segfaulted on me when I tried to use it. Disabling PCI Bus Control under Power Management in the BIOS of this G40 helped a bit, but it never got it working.

Still not knowing what to do, I tried good old Knoppix. Knoppix autodetected my wireless automagically, using the orinoco_pci driver for support. Worked great, or as best as I can tell anyway without a WAP. The little wireless light on my laptop started blinking and iwconfig gave comforting output indicating the device was working.

So now I'm trying recompile my kernel in Debian to use the orinoco_pci driver, as it did not before. I believe the appropriate option is HERMES_PCI or something similar. It has been a headache but at least the onboard wireless is supported. More when I get this working.

Update: Working Kernel Config

What should have been an easy task ended up a night-long series of recompiles, but in the end, I think I have it working. For some reason, compiling pcmcia_cs modules with make-kpkg started failing on me, with a compile error. I think it was caused by some kernel header file. Instead of using it, I changed my config to include pcmcia modules directly from the main kernel tree. Doing this, I had to change the PCIC line in /etc/default/pcmcia to be yenta_socket instead of i82365, but other than that, it worked nicely. Now I can modprobe orinoco_pci and iwconfig outputs the following.

Now I just need a WAP and I should be good to go I think. Have a look at my kernel config file if you have a need.