Orinoco
This FullMAC driver covers a range of older wireless cards which have varying capabilities. All the cards share a common MAC controller. They may differ by firmware (supplied by Agere, Intersil or Symbol) and bus connection.
caveats
WPA support is only available for Agere based cards, and requires a firmware download on startup.
Monitor mode may only be stable with certain firmware revisions.
supported chips
All the firmware variants are supported, though not all features may be available.
The Hermes I MAC controller is supported. The more recent Hermes II MAC controller is not supported.
Support for USB variants is only available in a fork of the main driver.
available devices
TODO:link to a device list
features
working
- Station mode
- Ad-hoc mode
- Monitor mode
- WEP
- WPA-PSK (TKIP)
not working yet
- USB based cards
- AP mode
- Radiotap headers in monitor mode
not supported
- WPA2
- WPA-PSK (CCMP)
device firmware
The driver will do its best to work with the firmware it finds on the card. This may restrict the capabilities of the card.
Firmware download to RAM is available for Symbol based spectrum_cs cards, and all Agere cards.
The spectrum_cs cards require two firmware files, symbol_sp24t_prim_fw and symbol_sp24t_sec_fw. Extraction tools (for windows drivers) can be found in orinoco-fwutils
The Agere firmware file must be named agere_sta_fw.bin. Extraction tools (for windows drivers) can be found at TODO:xxxx. WPA support requires at least firmware v9.42. v9.48 is available for download at TODO:xxxx