"Artem Onair Comcard 11": Variation found!

Michael Jarosch
2008-12-03T11:50:13Z

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3015 bytes --]

Hi there!

I recently bought a WLAN-PCMCIA-adaptor from Ebay, named "ARtem Onair
Comcard 11", which is reported to work with linux on several places in
the internet. Well - my special card doesn't work. But this is not a
"How can I get my device to work with Linux" issue, I promise! I did
some investigation about this card, which I want to tell you, and I hope
that this will help someone of the kernel-team to get things right!

O.k. - here's what I found:

My card's got an alternate label on the backside, saying:
"CC-W11-EMB PC-ETS-128"

The modalias of the card looks like this:
#cat /sys/bus/pcmcia/devices/1.0/modalias
pcmcia:m0268c0003f06fn00pfn00pa7CE6F45Bpb427B2E41pc3284C1FFpd00000000

The PCMCIA-Subsystem of a recent Kernel (2.6.26) prints out:
#pccard ident
Socket 1:
product info: "ARtem", "Onair", "Version 1.0", ""
manfid: 0x0268, 0x0003
function: 6 (network)

When I plug this card to my Debian Laptop, there won't happen that much.
No module is loaded. The kernel just prints out some stuff
to /var/log/syslog, saying:

kernel: pccard: PCMCIA card inserted into slot 1
kernel: cs: memory probe 0xa0000000-0xa0ffffff: clean.
kernel: pcmcia: registering new device pcmcia1.0

No big surprise: There is no kernel module with a fitting modalias!

I also tried this card with Deli-Linux 0.7, a distro, which is specially
made for old Devices. It uses the 2.4.34.4 kernel. There's also no
module loading when plugging in the card - initially.
In the PCMCIA configuration file /etc/pcmcia/config I found something
interesting:

card "ARtem Onair Version 1.0"
#version "ARtem", "Onair", "Version 1.0"
manfid 0x0268, 0x0001
bind "orinoco_cs"

which says to me that another Version of the ARtem Onair card with the
same chipset, but another manfid would just work. I edited the file and
changed the manfid from 0x0001 to 0x0003 and restarted the
pcmcia-daemon. When I now plug the card in, the modules "orinoco_cs",
"orinoco" and "hermes" are loaded and I get a network device, named
eth0. Now I can do some configuration with iwconfig. I also tried
changing the driver to "wavelan_cs" (because of an entry on
tuxmobil.org, look here: http://tuxmobil.org/pcmcia_ci10339.html ) -
looks the same to me.

I don't know if this card does perfectly work with this driver. Scanning
(with "iwlist eth0 scanning") is not supported and I can get no
WEP-connection with any accesspoints at home - simply because there
aren't any accesspoints that supports WEP. There would be some WPA2-APs,
but the package wpa-supplicant is not included in Deli-Linux. So: I
haven't managed to get a wifi-connection with this card and these
drivers!

BUT: It doesn't seem to my that support for this card on a recent kernel
is far away. And maybe someone with better capabilities than me should
get this thing done.

I'm very interested in helping! I want this device working, so don't
hesitate asking me!

greetings
Mitsch Jarosch