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Hi! I'm Robos.
This here is about the Epox ELW-C11 wireless pc-card
. I have looked long and hard and settled for this card since it is really cheap (got mine for under 70Euro/$) and has a prism2 chip in it that is supported quite well. The drivers for this card come from the linux-wlan project.. The advantage of this card is that it is capable of running in rfmon state in which it only captures packets. I will write an article about that shortly and will link then from here.
Installation is pretty straight forward for normal people ;-) In my case the situation was a little different. You need pcmcia "support" in the kernel in order to be able to build the modules prism2_cs, p80211 and ds. These are needed for the card. But, in my case, I also needed the pcmcia_cs package that is separate from the kernel. If your kernel has normal pcmcia-support and you don't need newer drivers from pcmcia_cs you are probably fine and the thing should build via make config (select the things you are interested in), make all and (as root) make install. I have the linux hotplug scripts installed and they handle the thing quite nicely.
There is one thing to mention: normally (well, what ever is normal in the quite fresh area of wlan) you configure the interface with iwconfig which is somewhat similar to ifconfig. That works pretty well with my other wlan-device "Netgear MA101 USB". Here you use, well, best wlanfe or you configured it correctly in the scripts so that if you plug in the thing the right parameters get set right away. So, what are these parameters:
The configuration is done in /etc/wlan/. Edit wlan.conf and edit
SSID_wlan0="blah" to your essid. Also ENABLE_wlan0=y should be set.
You should also copy wlancfg-DEFAULT to wlancfg-You might also need to edit /etc/pcmcia/network.opts. Look for "IPADDR" and insert your ip address (static) there. If you get a dynamic ip via dhcp, dunno how that works :)
Performance:
Well, the card seems to make something like 370kB (~4mbit). Not that good, other cards get even up to 500kB. But, that might also be caused by my other card, the usb one! Need to double-check that somehow...
Hacking
Well well well, it seems as if the builders of this thing also had one
of those micro-plugs in mind when they designed the layout. Take a look at
the shots here at
the fcc.gov. The pdf with the internal pics I mean. Do you see this mini
plug soldering point here?
. Hmm, maybe I test this some time. If you already did please tell me (robos@muon.de)!
All in all, for the money quite a nice card. Only one led is a little spartanic but it suffices.
News
14.11.2002: This page here upped
Last update: Wednesday, 28-May-2003 02:49:10 CEST
Due to some judgements in recent time I hereby want to express that I'm not involved in other sites I may link to from this page.
Epox USA
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Comments, Errata? Contact robos!
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