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Prism 2/2.5/3 USB devices (wlan-ng)

This page describes how to enable support for WiFi devices based on Prism 2/2.5/3 chips - using a USB interface - on Debian systems.

Intersil (now Conexant) Prism 2/2.5/3 802.11b USB devices are supported by the Linux kernel's wlan-ng driver. It was originally written by the linux-wlan-ng project and introduced as a staging driver at Linux 2.6.28. Supported devices are listed at the end of this page.

{i} Prism54 802.11g devices are supported by the p54 drivers.

{i} Prism 2/2.5/3 802.11b PCI and PC Card devices are supported by the hostap driver.

Installation

The prism2_usb Linux kernel module is included within Debian Linux kernel images.

Firmware for this driver (prism2_ru.fw) is available via the prism2-usb-firmware-installer package. Only some devices require firmware from userspace for their operation. For all devices, it will transiently upgrade station firmware to version 1.8.3.

  1. Connect the device to your system.
  2. If firmware is required to be provided for your device (e.g. Prism 3 Small Serial Flash):
    1. Add a "contrib" component to /etc/apt/sources.list, for example:

      # Debian 7 "Wheezy"
      deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ wheezy main contrib
    2. Update the list of available packages and install the prism2-usb-firmware-installer package:

      apt-get update && apt-get install prism2-usb-firmware-installer
    3. Reinsert the prism2_usb module to access installed firmware:

      modprobe -r prism2_usb ; modprobe prism2_usb
  3. Configure your wireless interface as appropriate.

Troubleshooting

Known Issues

Supported Devices

The page HowToIdentifyADevice/USB explains how to identify a USB device.

The following list is based on the alias fields of prism2_usb in Debian 3.2.0 (3.2.41-2) kernel images.

See Also


CategoryHardware | CategoryWireless