Lucent/Agere/Orinoco working driver and manager

As posted to USENET:

Greetings,

There is precious little public information on the 'Net regarding
working driver and utilities for Orinoco (Wavelan/Lucent/Agere)
PCMCIA cards on H/PC MIPS (Windows CE 2.11); the 'HPCFactor'
website has an inconclusive discussion thread but no
specific working solutions for MIPS 4000 machines. The following
procedure worked for me to provide a driver and client manager
application that supports Orinoco, Roamabout and perhaps other
Hermes-I cards on a Fujitsu Pencentra 130 (MIPS 4121 CPU) H/PC:

(package filenames can be found with a 'Net search)

1. Install the Orinoco 4.06 WinCE release 'WLWCE406.exe' using
'ActiveSync' on the x86 host, to the target H/PC.
Note that more recent versions of the Orinoco drivers
won't install even though advertised to support WinCE 2.11,
and they won't run if manually installed from CAB files on
the H/PC target.

2. Insert and Orinoco WLAN card and verify that it is detected
and remove the card.

3. Install the Roamabout package from file:
RoamAbout-client-WIN-CE-628-pkg.ZIP, using ActiveSync as above.

4. Insert the Orinoco card and then start the client manager app
by double clicking the 'signal bars' icon in the system tray;
verify that the card is detected and that it can be configured
in the application. Verify also that Roamabout cards work
as well, if you have one.

The Orinoco 4.06 package lacks the client manager application;
the Roamabout package also has additional features like site-survey
(which I have not yet tried).

Michael

The statement regarding an alleged lack of "a solution for MIPS 4000 devices" isn't accurate. The older Agere-based cards have been demonstrated to work fine on several MIPS 4000 H/PC Pro devices - I can attest to this myself. The 4.06 driver installer mentioned above is the Lucent WaveLAN driver, which does lack the additional features as you mention; however, the subsequent Agere ORiNOCO driver release includes additional features, including site scan, and does install and work fine on H/PC Pro devices. (The "more recent" version you mentioned is presumably the Proxim release, which was subsequent to the Lucent and Agere releases.)

However, there has definitely been a problem with the Lucent/Agere driver on the PenCentra - though the problem seems to be with installing it on the device in the first place.

Edited by CE Geek 2008-06-28 9:55 PM

Please do not double post your threads on this board. As per the forum rules.

C:Amie wrote:

> Please do not double post your threads on this board. As per the forum rules.

I did not intend to 'double post a thread' but only to post a solution to a topic
that has appeared in two fora on this site (Win CE 2.0 and Win CE 2.11). I
would have restricted my post to this forum but for the fact that this site's
search engine is broken (times out on message body searches and often
on subject searches) and thus an interested party from the Win CE 2.0
camp likely could not find it unless they manually browsed subject headings
in more than one forum:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80040e31'

Timeout expired

/forums/search/query.asp, line 215

In any case I encourage users of any private message board to post their
discussions to Usenet where it is publicly accessible and archived.

Michael

I'm not sure why "an interested party from the Win CE 2.0 camp" would need information about a Windows CE 2.11 version of a driver.

Nor the fact that the post you put up here on the 2.11 board was exactly the same as the one on the 2.00 board and doesn't even mention CE 2.00.