The D-Link DWL650 *was* one of the cheaper Prism2Cards available, before the taiwanese chipset invasion in the fall of 2002.


Comments:

Below is not the end of the story, by any means. In fact I'm not sure the Atmel version ever even shipped. However there have been multiple revisions of the card in stores, in computers, creating giant sucking sounds when *nixes try to use them. Most famously there is an AdmTek version and a RealTek version and for a while a dumbed-down version of their 650+ card shipped as the 650.

--JerrittCollord

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Hi Kids! A new note... an April 2002 filing with the FCC indicates there is a new DWL-650 in town, FCC ID KA22002020015-1. This is based on the Atmel chipset and is NOT a prism2 card. The telling features of this species is that the ugly grey plastic is not bumpy any longer but rather has short linear features aligned with the long axis of the card. Don't know where this is on the way to stores.

--JerrittCollord

(vcc issue below) Updated!

Jouni Malinen has included a workaround for this goofball card and its Vcc issues. Should work in a real PCMCIA slot with the prism2 driver and this switch (from his driver changelog):

From Fall 2001:

It is a PCMCIA card, but won't configure unless its (I've seen so far) in a cardbus slot. My guess is that it's PCMCIA but requires 3.3V, and the PCMCIA stuff I have available will only do 5V.

At any rate, to get this puppy working in an older Toshiba (tried on Tecra 720CDT and 740CDT) requires the BIOS option of Cardbus/16-bit instead of PCIC-compatible, and you'll only find support for the ToPIC95 and later chips in the newer external pcmcia-cs packages-- not the kernel tree. I don't know why they don't keep the kernel code in sync but they seem to be very different indeed.

The same is true under Windows too -- the BIOS must be changed to Cardbus and you'll have to install the proper Cardbus drivers. Otherwise, the card is detected, and you can install drivers, but it just sits there. Like it didn't configure.

I thought I'd pass this bit of knowledge along in case there's any more Toshiba owners out there.

The jist of this is now I've got 3 Prism2Cards in 3 Linux systems and I can sniff the full conversation. There is some debugging to be done with the driver in client mode methinks... sometimes I can't reassociate, etc.


JerrittCollord


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Dwl650Comments (last edited 2007-11-23 18:02:18 by localhost)