This page is
intended to provide a resource for those of us with wireless network cards based
on TI's acx100 chipset. Unfortunately no linux drivers have been provided for
these cards and TI has refused to release development documentation for the
chipset.
All is not lost, however, there are both binary (getting old now though) drivers and open source drivers to try to help you get your unsupported card working. So your options are:
The project to reverse engineer the drivers and produce an open maintainable driver can be found: here. It's probably worth trying to use the OSS version of the driver since it is now much more up to date than the binary version.
You will need to obtain a firmware file to use these drivers. You can extract one from the windows driver package, or there is a copy of the older 1.5 firmware at the bottom of this page.
Here
are a selection of drivers for TI acx100 chipset based 22Mbps WLAN cards. The
drivers are built for the following linux distributions, however, as the table
below shows it is possible to get them working (with a bit ot tweaking) on many
more distributions.
These are binary versions of the acx100 driver compiled for:
1. Mandrake 9.1
2. Mandrake 9.0
3. RedHat 9.0
4. RedHat 8.0
5. Debian 2.4.18
6. Mandrake 8.1
I have them working successfully on Suse 8.1, kernel 2.4.21 after simply relabeling
the modinfo with objcopy. (see HOWTO-ChangeVersion in the tar).
If you get them working, and have comments suggestions you think should go up
here, email me. You can find my address elsewhere on the site.
Driver contents,
kernel versions and GCC versions
| Version |
|
| 2.4.18-14 | Version: v0.9.0.3a GCC: (GNU) 3.2 20020903 (Red Hat Linux 8.0 3.2-7) Kernel: 2.4.18-14 Description string: 0.9.0.1c |
| 2.4.18-6mdk | Version: v0.9.0.3a GCC: (GNU) 2.96 20000731 (Mandrake Linux 8.2 2.96-0.76mdk) Kernel: 2.4.18-6mdk Description string: 0.9.0.3a |
| 2.4.18-6mdk3 | Version: v0.9.0.3a GCC: (GNU) 3.0.4 (Mandrake Linux 8.2 3.0.mdk) Kernel: 2.4.18-6mdk Description string: 0.9.0.3a |
| 2.4.19-16mdk | Version: v0.9.0.3a GCC: (GNU) 3.2 (Mandrake Linux 9.0 3.2.1mdk) Kernel: 2.4.19-16mdk Description string: 0.9.0.1c |
| 2.4.20-8 | Version: v0.9.0.3a GCC: (GNU) 3.2.2 20030222 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.2-5) Kernel: 2.4.20-8 Description string: 0.9.0.1c |
| 2.4.21-0.13mdk | Version: v0.9.0.3a GCC: (GNU) 3.2.2 (Mandrake Linux 9.1 3.2.2-3mdk) Kernel: 2.4.21-0.13mdk Description string: 0.9.0.1c |
| 2.4.18-686 | Version: v0.9b GCC: (GNU) 2.95.4 20011002 (Debian prerelease) Kernel: 2.4.18-686 Description string: 0.9b |
Success matrix
| Distribution | Kernel | PCI/PCCard | acx driver version | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SuSE 8.1 | 2.4.21-rc2-ac2 | PCCard | 2.4.20-8 | |
| SuSE 8.1 | 2.4.21-rc3 | PCCard | 2.4.20-8 | |
| SuSE 8.1 | 2.4.19-4GB | PCCard | 2.4.19-16mdk | |
| SuSE 8.1 | 2.4.21 | PCCard | 2.4.20-8 | |
| SuSE 8.2 | standard? | |||
| SuSE 8.2 | 2.4.20-4GB-athlon | ? | 2.4.20-8 | |
| RedHat 8.0 | 2.4.18 | PCI+PCCard | 2.4.18-14 | |
| RedHat 8.0 | 2.4.20 | PCI+PCCard | 2.4.20-8 | |
| RedHat 9.0 | 2.4.20-13.9 | PCCard | 2.4.20-8 | |
| SlackWare 9.0 | 2.4.20 | |||
| SlackWare 9.0 | 2.4.21-rc2-ac2 | |||
| Mandrake 8.2 | 2.4.18-6mdk | PCCard | 2.4.18-6mdk | |
| Mandrake 9.1 | 2.4.19-16mdk | 2.4.19-16mdk | ||
| Debian | 2.4.21-rc2-ac2 | 2.4.20-8 | ||
| Gentoo 1.4 | 2.4.20-gentoo-r5 | Pheenet WL-PCI | 2.4.20-8 | |
| Gentoo 1.4 | 2.4.21 | DLink 520+ | 2.4.20-8 | |
|
Debian |
2.4.19 | 2.4.18-686 | ||
| Debian | 2.4.20 | 2.4.20-8 | ||
| Debian | 2.4.21 | 2.4.21-0.13mdk | ||
| Debian | 2.4.22-pre2 | 2.4.21-0.13mdk | ||
| Debian | 2.5.74 | 2.4.21-0.13mdk |
Please email me with your details
for success/failure to add to the matrix above.
HOWTO_acx100.txt - v0.6 HOWTO for
the binary driver.
installAcx100 - v0.3 Install script.
acx100_bin_20030716.tgz - Current binary
driver package.
acx100sta.o.gz - << This is just the 1.5 firmware from the Linux binary. ** New
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