I feel a little stupid tonight.

Adam got himself a laptop and a wireless network card and asked me if I had a spare wireless access point he could buy off me. I didn’t, really, but took advantage of the situation to upgrade my wireless access point from 802.11b (11Mbps) to 802.11g (54Mbps). I ordered up a Linksys WRT54G from NewEgg and, after reading up on Linux compatibility and what-not, a Netgear WG511 cardbus adapter.

When everything came and I finally got around to trying it out, things seemed odd because I remembered reading that the card used the Prism54 driver, but my Googling indicated I needed the MADWIFI drivers.

I got the MADWIFI stuff compiled for the 2.6.11-1.14 kernel I’m currently using. It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world because the CVS snapshots of the driver code seem to only include support for 32-bit “i386” architecture and I’m running an Athlon64 with the x86_64 version of the Fedora Core 3 Linux distribution. Instead, I had to checkout the latest MADWIFI code from their CVS repository. This code included the files necessary to build the driver on a variety of platforms including the AMD64 stuff.

After the driver was built, I did a modprobe ath_pci successfully, so I know the kernel module built right and was installed okay. When I put the card in, however, nothing happened.

I checked to see if there were any messages posted to the system logs... nothing. There was a warning about PCMCIA power after I removed the card, but nothing else. As far as I could tell, the PCMCIA subsystem was oblivious to the presence of the card.

The card is a cardbus card, so it should just show up as a device on the PCI bus, if I understand things correctly. Running lspci doesn’t show anything.

Grrr.

The card works great in Windows. I can play high-quality XViD video off my file server while sitting in the bathtub via the Netgear card with no problems at all so I know the card isn’t defective.

So, I traced back my steps and came upon a disappointing discovery: The adapter I purchased is the Netgear WG511T. The adapter I meant to purchase is the Netgear WG511. The WG511T uses the Atheros 5202 chipset and the WG511 uses the Prism54 chipset.

*sighs*