The cards are supported in the prism54 driver. The driver is included in the Linux kernels since the 2.6.5 version. For older kernels (2.6 and 2.4 series), get the current snapshot from the prism54 driver Web pages and read carefully instructions in the README file.
In any case, you need the firmware. The firmware you should use is
isl3890, you can fetch it from the prism54 pages.
After you have installed the kernel with the prism54 driver, you can setup the card with wireless-tools (Debian users can install them from the package of the same name). I have used them for simple ad-hoc wireless network setup between two computers.
First run plain iwconfig to look for your wireless card and
to see its current setup. If you don't see it in the command output,
something is wrong. If the card is there, you can setup the ad-hoc mode
with something like (assuming your wireless interface is
eth0)
iwconfig eth0 mode ad-hoc
and the network identifier, to avoid interference with other wireless
networks, with
iwconfig eth0 essid mynetwork
If you want to secure your network from unauthorized access, you can set an
encryption key on it with
iwconfig eth0 key restricted 1234-5678-90AB-CDEF
After you have set your wireless card with
iwconfig, you can set your network in the usual way with
ifconfig etc.
Debian users can use /etc/network/interfaces for their
complete wireless network setup, see
/usr/share/doc/wireless-tools/README.Debian for more
details.
I suggest you to read the Linux Wireless HOWTO that contains a lot of information about wireless LANs on Linux.
Milan Zamazal
<pdm@zamazal.org>
Last modified: 2004-06-27 14:07 UTC.