Where to get the last station firmware?

[Pavel Roskin]

Hello!

> > Is it possible to get (for free) the last station firrmware (1.5.4)?
> 
> There is the posibility of downloading the windows drivers from intersil
> and then extract the firmware from it and downloading it to the ram of
> your card, I have jsust written an small howto in spanish on how to do
> this, you can get it from my home page.
> 
> BTW, if people feels like I should put that into english I can try to do
> it.

Yes, it would be a good idea.  Actually, I have just did it so I can
describe what I did.  You can include it in your HOWTO.

Get the driver from Intersil.  The website is hard to navigate and full of
Java, so that's the direct link:
http://www.intersil.com/design/prism/ss/crack-n-peel/prod-drvr/drv209/ISL3PRDSUIT-EXE_WIN_(2-0-9).zip

Unzip it.  Get the latest Wine (I'm using wine-cvs-opengl-101602-1 from
http://wine.dataparty.no/).  Run the executable under Wine.  It should
install.

If it doesn't install or you don't want to click on the license agreement,
find data1.cab and data1.hdr in the Windows temporary directory.  It you
take this approach, you need a program called i5comp.  I'm using version
2.01: ftp://ftp.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/pub/mirror/os2/win32os2/i5comp201.zip

Run it under wine:
wine i5comp x data1.cab

You should now have several files.  You need PRISMNDS.sys.  Remove the
binary parts at the beginning and the end of the file in an editor (we
really should fix split_combined_hex to make it unnecessary).  Now get
split_combined_hex and prism2_srec from CVS HostAP.  prism2_srec needs to
be compiled, split_combined_hex is a script.  Run split_combined_hex to
split the PRISMNDS.sys file:

./split_combined_hex <PRISMNDS.sys

Now you should have a directory with a random name containing the firmware
files.  Smaller files are primary firmware.  Larger files are secondary
firmware.  If somebody can host those files, then please put them on the
web - it should not be necessary for everyone to go through the steps
described above!

Now make sure that your HostAP driver is compiled with firmware loading 
support.  For that, uncomment "#define PRISM2_DOWNLOAD_SUPPORT" in 
driver/modules/hostap_config.h

Load the driver and try to load all those files by prism2_srec.  Load 
files to RAM, not to flash - this firmware is meant to be loaded to RAM.  
It may happen that you don't need primary firmware - then just load the 
secondary firmware.  It prism2_srec says that the NIC id doesn't match - 
try next firmware.

When prism2_srec says OK, you can start using the card with the new 
firmware.  Run dmesg to make sure that you have the new firmware.
If prism2_srec doesn't say OK with any firmware, then you are out of 
luck.  Try some other firmware or card.

I could successfully load rf010506.hex into a Linksys CompactFlash card 
WCF-11, which originally had braindamaged 1.4.2 firmware.  Now it works as 
an Access Point.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin