Hi guys!
I just wanted to add support for a new wifi card in WPA. I recently got a Belkin F5D6020 PCMCIA WiFi card for cheap on eBay. I was excited to try it out because documentation says that it runs on a Prism2 chipset, which should be compatible. However, to my surprise the card that I bought was Belkin F5D6020 ver.2 which comes with the atmel chipset. How come? Both cards are identical, exact same model, just the version number that is different, and still the internal chipset used is completely different!
With that being said, I went to research and check if I could make that card work under Linux. I got the latest Kernel and modules compiled by Stefan on this thread. Installation instructions are simple, just replace the zImage file on the FAT partition and decompress
(untar
) the contents of modules31681.tar to /lib/3.16.81/ on the ext4 partition. Booting Linux again brought me a semi-working card. The correct atmel module was loaded, but when I tried to fire up the card, I got an error message about a firmware file missing. Turns out that proprietary firmware is not included in Devuan, so you gotta install them yourself. The easiest way is to enable the contrib non-free packages on apt and then use a working WiFi
(or Ethernet
) card to download the correct package. This is a step-by-step
(do this as root
):
nano /etc/apt/sources.list
#Then under nano, edit all lines of your sources to add contrib non-free at the end, something like this:
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged ascii main contrib non-free
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged ascii-security main contrib non-free
After that, just run an “apt update” and wait a couple minutes
(it took around 10 minutes on mine
). Once you’ve updated your package list, install the required firmware by running
apt install atmel-firmware
Wait again for several minutes until it finishes doing its thing. Remember that you will need internet connection for this, so use a working WiFi or Ethernet card to download the package.
Once it is all done, you will still need to change a little detail to make the card work. Apparently, ip link dev is loading the wrong firmware file for the card, so you just need to create a symlink that points to the correct WPA-enabled firmware file for the Belkin card:
mv /lib/firmware/atmel_at76c502.bin /lib/firmware/atmel_at76c502.old
ln -s /lib/firmware/atmel_at76c502e-wpa.bin /lib/firmware/atmel_at76c502.bin
That’s it! After doing that, you can start the card with
ip link set dev eth0 up
and it will start blinking its lights. At the moment I’m installing wpa-supplicant and iwd to be able to configure and connect to WiFi networks through terminal, as Stefan mentioned. You can install these packets through apt on a working network connection:
apt install wpasupplicant iwd
I’ll post the results once these packets finish installing and I’m able to login to my WPA network.