Actiontec wireless PCMCIA cards and Linux.

This page details how to install Actiontec PCMCIA wireless cards under Linux. Searching Google gives the information that some Actiontec cards are based on the Prism chipset. What isn't clear is the Actiontec also make PCMCIA cards based on Atmel chips. Trying to use the Prism driver with these is doomed to failure.

Identifying Atmel based cards.

My card is marked

Actiontec 802CAT1

and has FCC id PQP-WP221P-X

Running dump_cis gives

  attr_dev_info
    fn_specific 100ns, 32kb
  manfid 0x0000, 0x0000
  funcid network_adapter
  vers_1 5.0, "WLAN", "802.11b PC CARD"
  config base 0x0800 mask 0x0001 last_index 0x02
  cftable_entry 0x01 [default]
    [mwait] [pwrdown]
    Vcc Vnom 3300mV Iavg 250mA Ipeak 250mA Idown 25mA
    timing wait 12us
    io 0x0000-0x001f [lines=5] [16bit]
    irq mask 0xffb8

Available drivers.

Not only have Atmel written Linux drivers, they have released them under the GPL. This page used to be about installing Atmel's drivers, however things have moved on and there are now drivers for these cards in the Linux 2.6.x kernel series. These are not the Atmel drivers, but a re-write based upon them.

For 2.6.x users, I recommend using the in-kernel drivers. To do so you will need to install the firmware package from here. There's a good page about using the 2.6.x drivers here.