WiFi Madness

I've finally got my new D-Link DWL-G650+ wifi card working on my laptop. I have revision B.1 of this card, which makes a big difference, the earlier revisions use a different chip. This card has an ACX111 chip inside, which is somewhat supported by Linux, but its not trivial.

Hoary comes with the acx_pci module builtin, and a collection of firmware. However, the module will try and load TIACX111.BIN to the card, which is wrong. It will successfully load, but the card won't work. The trick on Hoary is to steal FwRad16.bin from the driver CD and put it in /lib/hotplug/firmware, and then delete TIACX111.BIN from the same location. Only then will the right firmware be uploaded.

Sid is more fun, the module has to be built yourself (there is a package which makes this very easy using module-assistant), but don't do what the guides suggest and install acx111-firmware. Take FwRad16.bin and move it to /lib/firmware/TIACX111.BIN. Unlike the earlier versions the module in Sid will not fall back onto other firmware images.

Now that it is working, I've just got wait for the performance to increase: in a side-by-side test my cheapo Actiontec Orinoco PCMCIA card is transferring files 100Kb/s faster.

NP: Wrath Of The Math, Jeru The Damaja

12:00 Thursday, 26 May 2005 [#] [computers] (3 comments)

Posted by Dexter Ang at Thu May 26 13:23:27 2005:
My only question would be... can you get this to work correctly with things like NetworkManager (on RH) or netapplet (Hoary)? I'm personally using a DWL-650+ card which is an acx100 chip, but still using the same acx_pci module. My problem has been that, while it's scanning, it keeps disconnecting. So it will keep on disconnecting and reconnecting without any seemingly easy solution. Or I might just be missing some options or something.
Posted by Andrei Yurkevich at Thu May 26 17:00:37 2005:
Hope you're lucky, since DWL-650+ were reported to have a "slightly too high defect rate" according to the driver developers (http://lisas.de/~andi/acx100/).

Dexter: I'd recommend you upgrading to the latest version of the driver available ATM. - lots of things are getting fixed there with every release - see URL above.
Posted by gabriele at Thu Sep 1 13:27:27 2005:
Hey man you're great. I can now use my wlan on a packard bell b3510 !!! 
ubuntu hoary
wlan card is a XG650

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