Intersil prism 2.5 && WPA

[Pavel Roskin]

On Sat, 2010-04-03 at 12:14 +0200, Frank Hartmann wrote:

> The last time it was working was around debian etch and the bits of
> configuration which were left over seem to indicate I was using hostap
> and hostap_pci as kernel module and a tool called wpa_supplicant for
> other things in user space. I had to blacklist some other drivers,
> because there were multiple drivers for this chipset.

This should change in Linux 2.6.35, where the orinoco driver won't
support Prism chipset by default.

> Nowaday in debian squeeze it seems, that I can still use the kernel
> modules, but cannot configure wpa_supplicant to use them.
> 
> I tried then several live CDs with no good results.
> 
> Fedora-12-i686-Live.iso: I could not connect using a GUI called Network
> Manager, it offered only WEP support, and some other stuff, but no WPA

It looks like orinoco is loaded.

> ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso: exactly the same as fedora: Same tool,
> same options, WPA seems missing. The kernel modules loaded were hostap,
> hostap_pci, orinoco, orinoco_pci. I was able to connect to my WLAN using
> this life CD and another laptop with  a different chipset. There a
> choice "personal WPA" was visible.

It looks like the same problem.

> KNOPPIX_V6.2.1CD-2010-01-31-EN.iso: Same Network Manager GUI, but no
> wireless networks were shown. The kernel module used was orinoco_pci and
> I found a kernel crash related to this module in the output of dmesg.

Again, it's not a problem with the hostap driver.

> Is someone still using this chipset in combination with WPA and could
> direct me in the right direction?

Last time I tried hostap with WPA, it worked just fine.

> Or if I am the only one left with old hardware, is there a good place to
> start for debugging this a bit more? Is someone intersted in more details
> with respect to one of the listed setups, please? 

I'm not sure you have actually observed a problem with hostap.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin