SMC 2435W Wireless PCMCIA Card with SuSE 9.0
The SMC 2435W uses the Texas Instruments ACX100 drivers. There have been a few drivers released, but mostly this card is not supported for Linux by the manufacturers.

I got this card in early 2003, and at the time there were a couple of sites that had various binary versions available. The only one I can still find on-line in December is http://www.ivor.it/wireless/acx.html.

Ivor's driver worked fine on my IBM ThinkPad 380 running Mandrake 9.1 - well, it worked. The system tended to lock up if you didn't perform the removal sequence exactly right, and there were problems getting it to automatically configure on insertion/startup, but it could be made to work.

The ThinkPad went off to live in England for a while, and I came back to eventually install SuSE Linux (9.0) on a Winbook Si. The obvious next step was to get the SMC card working with it.

I tried Ivor's drivers, but the system seemed to hang consistently when the sound system was started during boot.

There is a project to develop open-source drivers at SourceForge: http://acx100.sourceforge.net/. For some reason, this requires the use of the Windows drivers which are referred to as "firmware". My first attempts at installing these were a failure - card not detected, other similar errors.

Then I found this page: http://www.houseofcraig.net/acx100_howto.php. Not only does Craig have a wonderfully thorough step-by-step procedure, complete with diversions for "what if", but he also supplies one set of the required "firmware" files that appear to work. Following his instructions carefully and using the CVS version of the drivers, I was able to compile and install the driver and get it to run.

Getting it to automatically load in SuSE was another matter. There is a blatant tool in YaST that offers to configure wireless cards for you, but for some reason whatever actually loads the card doesn't pull that information.

I should note that since this is a PCMCIA wireless network card, there are three potential categories for what subsystem gets to manage it - PCMCIA, Networking, and Wireless.

Finally I found the tool in YaST that offers to edit the sysconfig files directly, and while I'm not sure which files this changed, after running this the system was able to load the card, obtain a DHCP lease complete with router and DNS info, and enable the network.

The one problem that remains is that whenever I'm running the card in Linux, it causes problems for the Apple PowerBook wireless card on the same net. If the PowerBook goes to sleep it always looses it's wireless connection. When it comes back up it doesn't seem to reach the network at all if the SMC is running under Linux. With the card in the same laptop running Windows Me there is no problem with the PowerBook. Still working on that one.
- posted by Jonathan Hutchins @ 3:43 PM 0 comments