Toralf Lund wrote:
Has anybody got the Sparklan WL-385F USB WLAN adapter (http://www.sparklan.com/wl385f.htm) to work on a Fedora setup? I've tried various "built-in" drivers as well as the "Prism2" ones on http://www.linux-wlan.com, but with no luck so far. The unit shows up in usbview, and the kernel module loads with no complaints, but I'm not actually able to start networking; I get a "no device present" error message. Actually, Linux driver sourcecode is downloadable from Sparklan's web site, too, but I can't get it to build, and it just looks like it's just an older version of the linux-wlan code (which is why I tested that one.)
I asked Sparklan support about this, and got an answer only a few hours later saying:
Thanks for writing us. Regarding your question , please refer to the website as below, https://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-lc100020/
WL-385F is based on Zydas 1201 chipset not prism chipset, so do not use any prism driver.
And indeed, once I managed to build the driver after a bit of struggling (partly caused by a well-known problem of a missing ieee802_11.h), it all Just Worked... I got a wlan0 device, and the networking automatically starts and stops as I plug in or remove the USB unit - without doing any sort of config besides the driver installation. Or at least, I don't *think* I did; I messed about quite a bit with various config files while trying to get linux-wlan to work, so I'm not 100% sure that I had a "clean" setup when I installed the new driver...
That's with the "new" zd1201 driver here - the sf project also has an "old", linux-wlan based version which seems to be identical to the one found on Sparklan's web site. This is apparently modified to support other chipsets than the original linux-wlan code, so I was wrong in assuming that Prism2 was used (well, Sparklan told be that already, of course.)
- T
