Sitecom WL-011 wireless PCMCIA on Debian Sarge GNU/Linux install

Here's the documentation of what I did to use my Sitecom WL-011 (not v2) wireless PCMCIA network interface on my freshly installed Debian Sarge GNU/Linux. First I'd like to thank Asim Saglam who made his instructions for Debian GNU/Linux available here. I used those instructions when installing, and have incorporated parts of them in this document.

NOTES: I did this on an installation of Debian Sarge (aka. testing) that I made on 2004-10-10 using kernel-image-2.4.27-1-i686. My laptop is an IBM Thinkpad 240, and I completed a network install with a different network interface before I configured the WL-011.

If you are running RedHat, you can try my instructions to configure the Sitecom WL-011 on RedHat 9 GNU/Linux.

Before you start

Run this command to get the kernel-headers matching your running kernel:

apt-get install kernel-headers-$(uname -r)

Download, patch and compile the source

Download the source for atmelwlandriver version 3.3.5.6 and this patch. Unpack and patch the atmelwlandriver source, these instructions assume you have the source and the patch in the same directory:

tar xvfj atmelwlandriver-3.3.5.6.tar.bz2
cd atmelwlandriver
patch -p1 < ../atmel-debian-wl011-patch.txt

Now you should be ready to compile the source. Become root, and then run these commands from the atmelwlandriver directory:

make config

Answer n to all questions except these:

...
Build PCMCIA Drivers (y/n) : y
Build PCMCIA rfmd Driver (y/n) : y
...
Build applications (y/n) : y
Build command line application (y/n) : y
...

Now, do

make clean
make
make install

Finally, run

depmod -ae

to make sure you don't have any unresolved dependencies. If you have unresolved dependencies for pcmf502r.o, I suggest you read forum archives for the atmelwlandriver at sourceforge to find a solution.

Test the card

Insert the card into the socket, and look in /var/log/syslog. Your card should be identified something like this:

Socket 1:
   product info: " ", "WCard"
   manfid: 0xd601, 0x0007
   function: 6 (network)

If you can't find an entry with a matching manfid line in /etc/pcmcia/atmel.conf (I had one), add one like this:

card "Sitecom wireless 11Mbps WLAN PC Card"
    manfid 0xd601, 0x0007
    bind "pcmf502r"

and restart the pcmcia subsystem with a

invoke-rc.d pcmcia restart

Finally, the device name used by the Sitecom card is atml0, so you need to configure this. I added these lines to /etc/network/interfaces:

auto atml0
iface atml0 inet dhcp

Now your card should be autodetected on insert. To test this, run

cardctl eject

and remove the card from the pcmcia-slot. Then put it back in, and watch /var/log/syslog as the card is detected and brought online (hopefully).