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Hermes I and Spectrum24 Trilogy devices (orinoco)

This page describes how to enable support for WiFi devices based on the Hermes I (Lucent/Agere) and Spectrum24 Trilogy (Symbol) chipsets; using the Orinoco driver on Debian systems.

This page is about the Orinoco driver. See Wikipedia for information about the ORiNOCO brand.

Driver

The Orinoco driver is a collection of modules providing support for various 802.11b devices, based on the Hermes I and Spectrum24 Trilogy chipsets:

Previous support for Prism 2/2.5/3 chipsets (orinoco_pci module) is disabled by default since Linux 2.6.351, see hostap for device support. For support of Prism-based USB 802.11b devices, see linux-wlan-ng.

As of Linux 2.6.28, downloading of firmware to volatile memory (RAM) and WPA support is available for Hermes I-based devices. For WPA support, firmware version 9.42 (or later) is required. The Orinoco driver will attempt to download firmware from userspace during device initialization.

Firmware is required to be provided for Spectrum24 Trilogy-based devices without flash memory (e.g. Intel WPC2011BWW, Socket Communications WL6000-320).

Installation

The Orinoco driver was introduced in Linux 2.4.3 and consists of modules in Debian Linux kernel images.

WPA (Hermes I only)

You can skip this section if WPA support is not required, or if your device has a Spectrum24 Trilogy chipset.

Firmware version 9.42 or later is required for WPA support:

  1. Add a "non-free" component to /etc/apt/sources.list, for example:

    # Debian 8 "Jessie"
    deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
  2. Update the list of available packages and install the firmware-linux-nonfree package:

    # apt-get update && apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree
  3. Continue with the procedure below.

General

  1. For users with Spectrum24 Trilogy-based devices only: firmware is required for devices without flash memory. This can be downloaded and extracted using the get_symbol_fw script available from orinoco-fwutils:

    $ su
    # apt-get install unzip
    # exit
    $ wget 'http://downloads.sourceforge.net/orinoco/orinoco-fwutils-0.3.tar.gz?download'
    $ tar xvf orinoco-fwutils-0.3.tar.gz
    $ cd orinoco-fwutils-0.3
    $ ./get_symbol_fw
    $ su
    # mv symbol_sp24t_prim_fw symbol_sp24t_sec_fw /lib/firmware
  2. Connect the device to your system. The necessary kernel module is automatically loaded for supported devices.

  3. Configure your interface as appropriate. See also troubleshooting and known issues.

Troubleshooting

Known Issues

WPA

Monitor Mode

For Hermes I-based devices, Lucent/Agere firmware versions 7.xx and 8.xx are buggy with respect to monitor mode operation; the Orinoco driver will refuse to change to monitor mode if requested. Firmware versions <= 6.16 are required for this feature, see Other Notes regarding firmware flashing.

Monitor mode operation can be forced on buggy firmware versions by supplying force_monitor=1 as an option to the orinoco module:

echo options orinoco force_monitor=1 >> /etc/modprobe.d/local.conf

Other Notes

The station firmware on Hermes I-based devices can only be permanently upgraded/downgraded (flashed) through utilities available for the Microsoft Windows operating system. With respect to the AirPort card, its firmware can be indirectly flashed during installation of some Mac OS X operating system versions.

Installation of the hostap-utils package will blacklist the Orinoco driver modules. This package should be purged from your system if not required.

Supported Devices

airport

The AirPort card (not AirPort Extreme) is supported. This is an optional networking accessory for the following Apple systems:

orinoco_cs

The page HowToIdentifyADevice/PC_Card explains how to identify a PC Card device.

orinoco_nortel

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

The following list is based on the alias fields of orinoco_nortel in Debian 3.16 (3.16.7-ckt9-3~deb8u1) kernel images.

orinoco_plx

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

The following list is based on the alias fields of orinoco_plx in Debian 3.16 (3.16.7-ckt9-3~deb8u1) kernel images.

orinoco_tmd

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

The following list is based on the alias fields of orinoco_tmd in Debian 3.16 (3.16.7-ckt9-3~deb8u1) kernel images.

spectrum_cs

The page HowToIdentifyADevice/PC_Card explains how to identify a PC Card device.

See Also


CategoryHardware | CategoryWireless