ASUS WL-107g

Today I bought an ASUS WL-107g PCMCIA wireless card. It wasn’t hard to get it working under GNU/Linux - in my case, Gentoo. Here’s how I set it up.

1. Choosing drivers

There were two options: the drivers and ASUS utilities supplied on the card’s CD-ROM, or the open source drivers, released under the GNU General Public License. I chose the open source drivers.

2. Installing the open source drivers

Note: The beta driver release available when I wrote this post required Linux 2.6.13 or later.

2.1. Kernel configuration

Open the kernel configuration menu:

cd /usr/src/linux
make menuconfig

Check that the following options are enabled:

Device Drivers --->
    Network device support --->
        [*] Network device support
        Wireless LAN (non-hamradio) --->
            [*] Wireless LAN drivers (non-hamradio) & Wireless Extensions

If you change these settings, rebuild and boot the updated kernel before compiling the driver.

2.2. Driver installation

Download the driver archive and read the supplied README for any specific build requirements. Extract the archive, then change to the extracted directory. For a .tar.gz archive, use:

tar -xvzf driver-archive.tar.gz
cd driver-source-directory

Replace driver-archive.tar.gz and driver-source-directory with the actual archive and directory names.

Compile and install the driver. The installation step requires root privileges:

make && make install

3. Utilities

Useful tools include pcmcia-cs and iwconfig, which is provided by wireless-tools. Consult their manual pages for usage information.

On Gentoo, run the following commands as root:

emerge -av pcmcia-cs wireless-tools
rc-update add pcmcia default

Then edit /etc/conf.d/pcmcia as needed for your setup.

Have fun.