s'ung_q10_owner

Hi All,

I have recently acquired a Samsung Q10 (same as Dell Latitude X200 and Gateway 200) for a good price - running Win2K.

It came with built in wireless lan, which is an ORiNOCO mini PCI card.

The laptop is fine, but the wlan doesn't work. I've upgraded to the most recent drivers available from agere, and Windows Device Manager claims everything is working fine - but it doesn't see my and my neighbours wlans. Plugging in a DWL-650+ and D-Link drivers works fine.

Netstumbler 0.4.0 build 554 works fine with the DWL-650+, but sees no APs when using NDIS 5 or ORiNOCO direct.

The antenna is plugged into the card (I checked). There is only one antenna lead.

The Agere client utility reports:

Utility
Client Manager Variant 1 Version 3.30

Driver
NDIS5 Miniport Driver Variant 2 Version 7.82

Card
ORiNOCO Mini PCI card Variant 4 Version 5.00
Encryption capabilities WEP+128 RC4
Maximum Data Rate 11 Mbit/s
Serial Number 03UT09505717

Firmware
Primary Functions firmware Variant 1 Version 4.04
Station Functions formware Variant 2 Version 9.42

Is there anything else I can check or do, or do I have to accept I have a broken card? If so, what mini PCI card would people recommend I get for this laptop?

Thaks in advance for any replies

s'ung_q10_owner

Rotifer

Did you check to see if the single internal lead is hooked into the RF main jack? i made that mistake when i bought the internal wlan card for my toshiba

also was this an ebay deal? some notebooks will not accept a wlan board that is of different manufacturer

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s'ung_q10_owner

I believe it is, but I will re-check. From memory, there are two antenna attachment points on the card - something like MAIN and AUX, and the single antenna lead is attached to the MAIN socket.

It was bought from a store, not eBay, or any other auction site, so I believe the card to be 'oem'. I'm likely to want to replace the card anyway at some point.

Thanks for the reply.

s'ung_q10_owner

An update for those interested (if anybody).

I tried booting the Q10 with the recently available single CD Linux distribution "Knoppix V3.4-2004-05-17-EN" (see www.knopper.net).

This boots successfully from the firewire-attached internal CD-ROM, and amazingly, successfully uses the internal wireless card!

This is unusual in finding a Linux driver than works better than the Windows driver (it's usually the other way round).

Even better, it used 128bit WEP, which the card specs say it doesn't do!!!

So I've confirmed that the hardware works (like a charm), so it's either a Win 2k driver problem or a configuration problem.

Any ideas what to do next?

Regards

s'ung_q10_owner

peekitty

And did Knoppix prompt you for driver discs, or launch "new hardware detected" wizards? No, because all the other drivers for your laptop are already there. It wouldn't go as smoothly if you were doing a new install of Win2000 or god forbid, WinME. Actually, you probably have an 2000 install in your future, if removing the card from device manager and reinstalling it doesn't help (it will reuse the current driver,) you'll probably find that a format & reinstall will do the trick.

Barry

knoppix-hdinstall

Requires Windoze 2000 or better, choose better, install Linux!!

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s'ung_q10_owner

Hi peekitty,

I run an m68k Debian distro and SuSE as well as using Knoppix (which is Debian based). I'm a fan. It's not badmouthing Linux to point out that drivers tend to be more available for Windows than Linux. It will be nice when that changes and h/w manufacturers release more Open Source (i.e. GPL or BSD) drivers.

As for a reinstall in my future, it looks like it, as the Control Panel has two copies of the link to the client manager - one which works, and one which doesn't - it looks like a deinstall/reinstall went wrong - probably due to me installing new wireless s/w before removing the old. The non-functional link doesn't want to go away.

I can't convert to Linux-only operation, as the Samsung Q10 is actually for someone who is visually disabled and needs to use a screen reader (Jaws). Unfortunately, although sporadic work is being done on Linux (actually X11) screen readers, there aren't any out there that work sufficiently well yet. Unfortunately, the X windowing protocols and software were not designed with accessibility in mind. MS Windows is the platform of choice for accessibility, and although there are things like blinux out there, accessibility options for those wishing to use alternative OSs are limited. Apple are good, and MacOS X shows promise in that regard, but Apple Accesibility is unlikely to apply to X windowing, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, I was hoping to avoid a reinstall - it looks like I will have a busy weekend.

Finally, given that the wireless card does work under Knoppix 3.4, can anyone advise me as to what drivers I would be best choosing under Windows 2000?

Regards,

s'ung_q10_owner

peekitty

As a last ditch effort, you could try removing all the driver files from the /winnt/system32 folder, and then reinstall the card, but it might not have the desired result.

s'ung_q10_owner

I'll give it a go - the worst that happens is I have to reformat and reinstall + plus all the windows updates (sigh) - but I'm planning on doing that anyway.

Thanks.

s'ung_q10_owner

waitwhat

There is an issue with frame preambles and orinoco cards. They require the access point to use long instead of the more common short preambles. Some wireless routers allow you to change that option, some do not.

s'ung_q10_owner

Interesting if true, but not relevant to this problem.

The hardware works perfectly when booted into Knoppix (version shown earlier in thread), connecting to my AP and surfing the web and allowing me to read and post to this forum. This means the 'short vs long preamble' issue does not apply here, as I've made no changes to the base station.

The issue is that I have been unable to get Windows 2000 drivers to work. Plugging in a PCMCIA D-Link card works fine under Windows 2000, the ORiNOCO card works fine under Knoppix (Linux), it just refuses to cooperate under Windows 2000 - or rather Win2K doesn't cooperate with it!

I've not had the time to do a full Windows reinstall this weekend, but it'll probably happen over the next couple of weeks. I'll send Microsoft the bill for my time

In the meantime, can anyone point me towards a _definitive_ place to get Win2K drivers for this ORiNOCO mini PCI card? Is it Lucent/Proxim/Agere/Wavelan/Honky-Tonk Corp. of Taiwan/Whatever?

Thanks all,

s'ung_q10_owner