Wireless WLAN (Prism2_USB)

SuSE 9.1 comes with wireless device modules, but none of them directly support the CV-50's inbuilt WLAN card. The CV-50's WLAN card is based on the Prism2 chipset, and is attached to the USB bus. SuSE 9.1 has wlan-ng modules (km_wlan package), but an older version 0.2.1pre21 which does not have the Product_ID and Vendor_ID which allows wlan-ng to auto-detect the CV-50's WLAN card. One option is to modify the 0.2.1pre21 source (found in the km_wlan package), by adding the line...

{PRISM_USB_DEVICE(0x0bb2, 0x0302, "Ambit Microsystems Corp.")},

...underneath the structure static `struct usb_device_id usb_prism_tbl[]' in the file `/usr/src/kernel-modules/linux-wlan-ng-0.2.1-pre21/src/prism2/driver/prism2_usb.c'. Then you will need to re-compile the Prism2 USB driver. This is done by using the commands `make config' -- you only need the USB driver, `make all' and `make install' when you are logged in as root in the `usr/src/kernel-modules/linux-wlan-ng-0.2.1-pre21' directory.

My preference is to get the newest version of linux-wlan-ng, which at the time of writing was 0.2.1-pre26. The pre26 version has a definition for the 0x0bb2/0x0302 device. By default, the new modules (prism2_usb.ko and p80211.ko) are installed in /lib/modules/(kernel version)/linux-wlan-ng, rather than /lib/modules/(kernel version)/extra. There might be a way to get the `make install' script to install the modules in the `extra' directory. I simply chose to delete the prism2_usb.ko and p80211.ko module from the extra directory and then running the command `depmod -a'.

For some reason, the WLAN seems to work better if it is turned on after then CV-50 has completed booting. Some other Sharp notebook users (MM-10 users) have also noted that WLAN seems to be properly configured only if the WLAN is turned on as late as possible. Fortunately, turning on/off the WLAN with the Fn-F1 key combination is easily done. This WLAN switch appears to be in hardware, and is not OS dependent.