Orinoco
This FullMAC driver covers a range of older wireless cards which have varying capabilities. All the cards share a common MAC controller. They differ by firmware (supplied by Agere, Intersil or Symbol) and bus connection.
Depending on the card (and the bus it uses), you will need to load one of the following drivers:
- airport - An Apple Powerbooks internal Airport.
- orinoco_cs - Typical PCMCIA card.
- orinoco_nortel - PC Card connected to a PCI bus via custom PCMCIA-PCI adapter.
- orinoco_pci - Typical card connected via PCI.
- orinoco_plx - PCMCIA card connected to a PCI bus via a PLX bridge.
- orinoco_tmd - PCMCIA card connected to a PCI bus via a TMD chip.
- spectrum_cs - Driver for Spectrum24 PCMCIA cards.
Contents
caveats
WPA support is only available for Agere based cards, and requires a firmware download on startup. This support will be introduced in the 2.6.28-rc kernels.
Monitor mode may only be stable with certain firmware revisions.
supported chips
- All the firmware variants are supported.
- The Hermes I MAC controller is supported.
- The Hermes II MAC controller is not supported.
- Support for USB variants is only available in a fork of the main driver.
available devices
See the orinoco 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 based cards (including the AirPort).
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. An extraction tool (from Windows drivers) can be found in this e-mail. WPA support requires at least firmware v9.42. v9.48 is available from the linux-firmware tree.
WPA support
The Agere WPA support does not work with the recommended wpa_supplicant ap_scan=1 mode. In this mode wpa_supplicant asks the driver to associate with a specific AP. Please use ap_scan=2 instead, which associates by SSID. In this case roaming will be controlled by the firmware instead of wpa_supplicant.