wskellenger's Journal: DWL-520 E1 wireless card working...

I've got the D-Link DWL-520 (E1) wireless card working on the old Pentium 200 (jukebox) machine.

Some people are saying that a PCI 2.2 compliant motherboard is necessary, but I've got it working here on this old PC (BIOS from '97) with no issues.

This document, by Andrew Barr, was what helped me with most of the setup. It is one of the most complete how-to descriptions that I've ever read.

The biggest issue I had was trying to understand all of the various drivers out there.

I initially tried HostAP, but the kernel module would simply not load on my machine.

I also tried wlan-ng, which *did* load, but then I couldn't get it to download firmware to the card.

Later, I found that the version of HostAP that I was trying to use was quite old, and the newer one was masked in Gentoo. I emerged the masked version using the "ACCEPT_KEYWORDS" variable as I described earlier in this journal, and installed version 0.2.5. This version loaded up and I was able to flash the firmware onto the card with no issues.

I also changed the baselayout on this machine as described here on the Gentoo forums. This is slick. After installing the firmware, /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 start just "worked" and got an address from my router.

Get firmware uploading working as Andrew described in his document (configure the hostap_fw_load script)

To get the module and firmware to load at boot, I created a file called "wlan0" in /etc/modules.d/ with the following contents:

alias wlan0 hostap_pci
post-install hostap_pci /usr/sbin/hostap_fw_load wlan0

Do a modules-update and reboot. UPDATE 4/9/05: The location of some files has changed for the latest hostap-utils. I am moving to the 2.6 kernel and now my wireless card quit working...