D-Link DRC-650 and wpa_supplicant fails

[Alberto Venturini]

On Mon, 25 Dec 2006 18:15:59 -0500
Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 2006-12-25 at 12:37 +0100, Alberto Venturini wrote:
> > I've bought a D-Link DRC-650 wifi pc-card (AKA D-Link "Neteasy"), and
> > [...]
> > 
> > My first doubt is the driver: this card has a PrismII chipset, so I
> > think the hostap driver is fine. But when I plug the card in, the udev
> > subsystem loads both hostap_cs and orinoco_cs modules. I'm a bit
> > confused: why are two drivers loaded? I'm using a 2.6.19.1 kernel; the
> 
> Because both drivers can actually drive your hardware.  Drivers are
> supposed to be _able_ to bind to any hardware they support, which is
> 100% correct and fine.  Where this starts to break down is that, of
> course, only one driver should bind to the card.  So you get to add
> orinoco_cs, hermes, and orinoco to your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file
> (or wherever Arch keeps the modprobe blacklist file).
> 

Ok, thank you :)

> > Anyway, the card is identified, and when I do "iwconfig", both
> > wlan0 and wifi0 interfaces are listed. Now, I want to run
> > wpa_supplicant, and I run these commands:
> > 
> > [root at vega ~]# iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
> > [root at vega ~]# ifconfig wlan0 up
> > [root at vega ~]# wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
> > -Dhostap
> > ioctl[PRISM2_IOCTL_PRISM2_PARAM]: Operation not supported
> > 

I solved it upgrading the firmware, as explained here:
http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/ . The preinstalled firmware
was an old 0.8.3 version; I upgraded it to 1.7.1, and now everything is
working fine.

Goodbye,
Alberto