Mathieu's log

In order to install a wireless connection in my mother’s laptop, I used an old Netgear PCMCIA wireless card of mine. However, I faced the problem that when clicking on the home network in the list of available networks in NetworkManager, WPA encryption wouldn’t come out as a possible encryption method, although the network IS using WPA. The solution was to flash the card’s firmware. You can find an excellent how-to here but here’s a quick summary of what I did (assuming the interface is wlan0).

# apt-get install hostap-utils
$ wget http://www.red-bean.com/~proski/firmware/Latest-prism.tar.bz2
$ tar xvfj  Latest-prism.tar.bz2
$ cd Latest-prism/
# prism2_srec -f wlan0 -O /proc/net/hostap/wlan0/pda primary-FLASH/pk010101.hex secondary-FLASH/sf010804.hex

You can run the following command before and after the firmware upgrade to check that the firmware version was upgraded correctly:

# hostap_diag wlan0

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at 12:52 am and is filed under In English, Sysadmin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.