J720 Linux Wifi (Asus Spacelink Wl110 / Prism2)

Hi,
just wanted to confirm that the Asus Spacelink WL110 Wifi card works under Linux on the Jornada 720 with the kernel provided by Stefan.

Hardwarewise, it is a CF type 2 card and needs an adapter to PCMCIA to work in the Jornada. The adapter itself is "stupid" and I got the cheapest one from Amazon which works fine. The card won't work in the bottom CF slot on the Jornada since it's somewhat thicker than CF memory cards.

Softwarewise, it will work with the hostap_cs Linux kernel module. It might need a firmware update since WPA encryption came quite a while later after the card was sold. You can find out from the Linux boot log (dmesg) if it's recognized and if it needs an update:
- Find lines similar to the below on dmesg output:

wifi0 : NIC: id=0x800c v1.0.0 
wifi0 : PRI: id=0x15 v1.1.1 

wifi0 : STA: id=0x1f v1.8.2

The last two lines are important, v1.1.1 and v1.8.2 are needed to support WPA encryption.

- To upgrade follow the instructions here:
https://www.omegamoon.com/blog/comments.php?y=09&m=08&entry=entry090...

I used the firmware files from here:
http://ftp.penguin.cz/pub/users/utx/prism2-firmware/lib/firmware/pr...

Then reboot and re-check the dmesg output.

Network and WPA configuration have already been covered by Stefan et.al. in another thread so will give a reference to a ubuntu support article here which I found helpful:
https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/WLAN/wpa_supplicant/

(Its in german, but running through google translate should give a sufficiently clear picture)

Cheers
timo

TimoB0:
Wow, that is great news with great clues!! Hadn't seen this until now...does the J720 slow down with this card? Its quite responsive with the wired ethernet NE2000 compatible cards...but that requires an ethernet cable/tether.

Your previous post on gemu-systemd-spawn-container-CF (what I recall of it) trick/tip is really useful and so easy to set up, IMHO!!

Hi Joval,

glad you found the previous post useful

Re the Asus card, I didn‘t notice the machine getting slower or unresponsive so I think its okay. Throughput however wasn’t really brilliant but thats probably due to my Wifi setup at home. I‘ll need to do some more testing and maybe create a seperate 2.4Ghz network.

Kind regards
timo

Oh btw:
I got a Proxim Orinoco Gold card from ebay which was claimed to be compatible to the original Lucent Orinoco cards but it turned out it isn‘t. I think there are several versions of this card all labeled Orinoco and some may actually be rebadged Lucent (discernible by the shape of the black antenna part) cards but the one I got (see picture) definitely isn‘t - theres a driver in the Linux kernel but it will crash on load.

Thanks
timo





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Hi!
Do you know which chipset the Proxim Orinoco Gold card has? And please tell me the name of the driver/module it loads.

Stefan

Hi Stefan,

the driver is buried under “Staging Drivers” in the device driver tree, the name is wlags_49. It will compile just fine and loads when the card is inserted, however it then crashes with a lot of output and after which the machine gets unstable.
I believe the driver is more mature in later kernel versions.

The card chipset for this one is Hermes II, however there are different variations some of which should work with the orinoco driver.
This particular card is model 8420-wd / Agere 111-PC as per the back label. I think the ones labeled “110-PC” are the older ones with the original Orinoco chipset.

Btw: This was one of the reasons I asked for your kernel source which I then compiled myself. Didn’t spend much time looking at why the driver crashes since I have the Asus card too.

Another thing I’m working on is rebuilding the userland from source, I’m using “buildroot” which is pretty straightforward and can be tweaked to give a really snappy system as its optimized for embedded systems. I can share more details if interested, at the moment its experimentation stage

Kind regards
timo

I’m not 100% sure about it, but I believe that some of the WPA encryption/decryption for these old cards is passed to the host. If that’s true, a pure Ethernet cabled card would be much faster, especially for X forwarding and VNC

Edited by ntware 2021-01-02 10:39 AM

Hi ntware,
I agree, this is what I suspect too. Haven’t found details though as to which parts being processed on the card and which on the host. I think I read that wpa_supplicant does the authorization part only and let the card do the rest. However if the encryption runs on the host, then yes that’s probably a big processing load.
Also, these 16 bit cards are generelly not fast as I believe the 5ghz standard came quite a while later, so probably restricted to b/g standard with nominal 54mbit.

Kind regards
timo