[MLB-WIRELESS] pci adapter (PLX again)

[Jason Hecker]

The $98 Netgear MA301 is a PLX PCI9052 chipset based one by the looks of 
it.  As I explained in an earlier post about PLX cards, they are a bodge 
but work with wireless cards.

At the moment, if your wireless card is an Intersil Prism2.x based one, get 
the latest Linux drivers for it from www.linux-wlan.com and compile the 
driver with PLX support.

If your wireless PCMCIA card uses the Orinoco drivers (not just orinoco 
cards, quite a lot work with orinoc à  o), go to 
http://ozlabs.org/peodgibson/dldwd/orinoco-0.10/ for the latest Linux 
Orinoco drivers and build the orinoco_plx driver and you should have no 
problems there.

I am working on getting orinoco_plx to work with Cisco PCMCIA cards, as I 
have a Belkin PLX PCI9052 based card I picked up from Harvey Norman last 
week for $99 and a Cisco Airo-350 I need to get up and running.

The Linux PCMCIA Card Services package supports proper PCMCIA->PCI/ISA 
adapters (like x.net sells).  It doesn't support the PLX chipset at all and 
never will.  Also, I'd be very careful to not hotplug the wireless cards 
into the PLX adapters as the PLX drivers in Linux aren't necessarily 
written to support hotplugging.

Windows and PLX is more complicated.  Some of the PCMCIA cards from Belkin 
and Netgear come with the respective PLX adapter - as do others.  I can't 
speak for mixing and matching particular PLX adapters and other branded 
wireless cards as the Windows driver bonaries may only work with certain 
fixed combinations (ie all bits from the same manufacturer).

Could someone elaborate on how PLX adapters and various wireless drivers go 
in whateverBSD?

jASON



At 11:54 AM 4/04/2002 +1000, Matthew Chipman wrote:
>Does anyone know anything about this card,  would it work with the $50.00
>cards and/or under linux?
>
>Available from Harris Tech for 98.00
>
>Those wiser than myself may be able to offer some info?
>
>-Matt
>
>http://wirelesscentral.net/aprod/MA301.html


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