[CLUE-Tech] Linksys wireless card

[Dale K. Hawkins]

Hey all.

First, kudos to a couple of great talks last night.

I am laughing because the second talk seemed especially relevant for
me.  I am getting ready to setup DSL to my house again.  I have done
this before and run things at work.

However, this time one of my goals is to have 801.11b access for my
laptop with the need to leave my main system up and running all the
time.  So I went on down to Best Buy and bought a Linksys Wireless
Access Point Router which came with a pcmcia card.  The price after
rebate was $99.  So I am not worried that I will be losing much should
the experiment fail.

The router setup is all fairly easy.  I was also pleasantly surprised
to see various firewall-like options, i.e., port filtering, port
forwarding etc.  All-in-all, probably enough for a pretty good home
network.  (Though, one could always drop a custom coyote box between
the router and ISP).

I am waiting for DSL service to be activated (next week sometime) so I
cannot say much more at this point regarding the routing functions.

The other part of the saga is just beginning.  I am just beginning to
try to get the pcmcia to work.  So far I have learned which drivers
support the card.  Er, I should say which drivers support versions 1
through 3 of the card.  I apparently have a version 4 card.  I have
determined the chip to be a realtek 8139.  I have found drivers (as
modules claiming to be for version 2.4.18 of the kernel -- I have
2.4.20).  So yesterday I spent most of my time downloading the
appropriate stock Debian kernel (I have a Knoppix install) and
headers.  Today I will to get the card to work.

Does anyone have experience with this sort of thing?  Or does anyone
wish to hear continued progress reports?

-Dale