Planet WL-3552 11Mbps (802.11b) Wireless LAN PC Card

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Image of the front.
Image of the back.

Although this card is not actually advertised as Linux compatable by Planet and there is very little details about it on the internet I can confirm that it does work under Linux. It is an Atmel card underneath the Planet branding and the drivers available from http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net/. The particular driver that this board will function with is the pcmf502rd driver so if you know what you are doing this should be all the information you require. For those slightly less knowledgable about compiling and installing new drivers I have given a few instructions below describing what I had to do after downloading the drivers.

Installing the drivers

Before you can compile these drivers I think you will need at least the source code used to produce the pcmcia card service tools that you are using and possibly the headers for your running kernel (though I am not certain about this). As I run my own custom compiled kernel (and use the pcmcia-cs drivers built into it) I did not need to worry about this.

After downloading and untaring the drivers you need to run make config and answer the questions you will be asked. With the drivers I downloaded (version 2.1.2.2) I was asked the following questions (my answers are in red): I answered 'n' to the question about the Winter xvWindows application because to build that you need the xforms library which I do not possess but you can still build and use two command line utilities instead.

After doing this you should then run make all and then as root run make install. This will install the drivers and a couple of configuration files into the necessary places. Next on the list of things to do is to restart the pcmcia drivers (/etc/init.d/pcmcia restart on Redhat) and then insert the PCMCIA card. This will probably still result in a failure to load the drivers, if so do not worry that is what happened to me. If the card now loads properly (normally signified by two high pitched beeps from your speakers) then you can skip the next paragraph.

As root run the command cardctl ident, the output from which I have included below.

# cardctl ident
Socket 0:
  product info: "Wireless", "PC_CARD", "", ""
  manfid: 0x0000, 0x0000
  function: 6 (network)

This is the output from my card and gives two lines that need adding to the configuration file for the drivers. Open /etc/pcmcia/atmel.conf in your favourite text editor and scroll to the bottom. Now add the following lines to the file:

card "Wireless"
  manfid 0x00, 0x00
  bind "pcmf502rd"

This is made up from three parts. The first line is a partial match for the card's identifying name. The second line is the manufacturer's ID and the third line says which driver should be loaded. Now save the file, eject the card and restart the pcmcia drivers again. This time when you insert the card you will hopefully get two high pitched beeps which signifies that the card was detected and installed correctly. If you don't get two high pitched beeps then check your log files to try to locate the problem. If you did get two beeps you are ready to progress to the next section.

Configuring the card

The card can be controlled using one of three utilities. Most of the features can be controlled using the iwconfig application which is part of the wireless-tools package. There are also two applications that come with the Atmel drivers, the first is called fvnet and the second is called lvnet. lvnet is by far the more fully featured application of the two and allows you to monitor the status of the card, configure the card, set various WEP values and also perform a site survey to see what access points can be located in the vacinity. One thing to note about the lvnet application is that it will not run in a standard xterm window, you must enlarge it slightly to get it to run. fvnet allows you to view the status and configure the card but it does not include the site survey feature.

If you do not know what the various features do then I recommend you search the internet and read the manual pages for the various tools (lvnet, fvnet and iwconfig) to get descriptions of the various options.

I hope that you find these instructions useful and that you are able to get your card working as well as I have. If you have any specific queries then please drop me a line or send an e-mail to one of the mailing lists that are used for discussing these drivers.

Any Questions??? E-mail me at alec@edworthyuk.co.uk