[Scottish] wifi blues

[Colin McKinnon]

Hi all,

Having recently expiremented with Debian vs SuSE, I was really impresed by the 
perfomance of the former so (after a horde of troubles I eventually traced 
back to a dodgy IDE cable) I put Debian on my main home machine. (Started 
with a knoppix install then upgraded online).

Everything is now working well except for my WiFi card; a Linksys WMP-11 (the 
early one that worked with Linux) which SuSE installed a prism2 driver for.

The new install uses the Orinoco driver by default while SuSE used the Prism2. 
With the Orinoco driver installed, it always starts up in 'Managed' mode, 
regardless of the config. when I set the mode to Ad-Hoc, I loose any signal:

eth0      IEEE 802.11b  ESSID:"linux-wlan"  Nickname:"kermit"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437GHz  Access Point: 44:44:44:44:44:44
          Bit Rate=2Mb/s   Sensitivity:1/3
          Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=0/92  Signal level=-68 dBm  Noise level=-122 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

iwconfig eth0 mode Ad-Hoc
iwconfig
eth0      IEEE 802.11b  ESSID:"linux-wlan"  Nickname:"kermit"
          Mode:Ad-Hoc  Frequency:2.437GHz  Cell: 02:06:D5:72:AE:1C
          Bit Rate=2Mb/s   Sensitivity:1/3
          Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

If I `rmmod orinoco_pci`, I can then load up the prism2_pci driver (but only 
as wlan0 - not eth0), and it too seems to decide it's own settings:
wlan0     IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"linux-wlan"  Nickname:"linux-wlan"
          Mode:Auto  Frequency:2.432GHz  Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
          Bit Rate:2Mb/s   Tx-Power:-971784352 dBm
          Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Link Quality=0/92  Signal level=-69 dBm  Noise level=-90 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

If I then try to change these settings via iwconfig I get an error:
iwconfig wlan0 mode Ad-Hoc
Error for wireless request "Set Mode" (8B06) :
    SET failed on device wlan0 ; Operation not supported.

Help!

TIA,

Colin