And then... normality slowly sinks in.

Updates

We're getting settled into Jay and Jennie's basement. I don't know how long we'll be here, but for now we're comfortable and there's enough room for us.

Jay and Jennie have a large backyard and our dog Kermit loves it. I brought in 12 bags of play sand a couple days and made a sandbox for Maya and Lucy. They've been playing outside a lot.

Open source takes flight

Last week, Jay and I decided to set up a wireless network at his house so he could share our broadband connection which is being routed through one of my Linux boxes. I bought a Linksys WAP11 802.11b wireless access point. For his desktop PC, Jay bought a PCI wireless network adapter. For my laptop, I purchased an SMC 2632W 802.11b PCMCIA wireless network adapter.

Installation of the Linksys access point went flawlessly. I was having trouble getting the SMC card working in Linux, so I booted my laptop into Windows where it worked perfectly after the driver files were installed. Jay had some trouble with his NIC, but got it working after a couple reboots.

Of course, I prefer using Linux on my laptop instead of Windows. I used Windows for a couple of days so that I could experience the freedom and mobility the wireless connection offered, but I really wanted to use Linux.

I tried to get the card working in Linux, but it wasn't easy. First of all, SMC has no fewer than three versions of the 2632W NIC. Mine is version 3. SMC offers downloadable versions of Linux drivers for version 1 and version 2 of the adapter, but no Linux support for version 3.

Version 1 of the 2632W uses the Prism2 chipset. This seems to be pretty well supported by the orinoco_cs PCMCIA kernel driver in recent Linux kernels.

Version 2 of the 2632W is supported by the fvnetr_cs module.

Version 3 uses the Atmel AT76C503A chipset. Support for this chipset isn't available in standard kernel distributions and SMC provides no Linux drivers on their website. However, I discovered an open source project hosted on SourceForge aimed at providing Linux support for wireless LAN devices based on this chipset.

The URL for the project website is: <http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net/>.

To get the SMC 2632W V.3 working, I had to compile and install the drivers provided by the ATMEL WLAN Driver project. Specifically, I needed the pcmf502rd module. To get this to work, I needed to add the following sections to the /etc/pcmcia/config file:

device "pcmf502rd"
  class "network" module "pcmf502rd"
  

card "SMC 2632W 11 Mbps 802.11b WLAN Card"
  version "SMC", "2632W"
  manfid 0x01bf, 0xb301
  bind "pcmf502rd"

I also added the following line to the /etc/pcmcia/config.opts file:

module "pcmf502rd" opts "ESSID=MYSSID"

Finally, I added this block to the /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts file:

*,*,*,00:04:*)
    INFO="SMC network adapter"
    CHANNEL="1"
    ESSID="MYSSID"
    MODE="Infrastructure"
    RATE="auto"

Once I did all this, I restarted the PCMCIA service on the laptop. I'm running Red Hat 9, so I did this with the following command (as root):

/sbin/service pcmcia restart

I first installed version 2.1.1 of the Atmel driver, but it seemed a bit unstable so I tried the 2003-05-14 snapshot. That seems (so far), more stable.