Wednesday, December 24. 2003
If you ever want to waste a day of your life, go buy a D-Link DWL-520 WiFi PCI card from your local Best Buy and try to get it running under Linux. It seems like an easy enough task, there are
plenty of
good resources which provide drivers for the PRISM2/2.5/3 chipset (the one the DWL claims to run on).
The reality however, is much harder to both find and comprehend... here's why:
- DWL-520 != DWL-520
Seems strange, but true. In fact, there are five different versions of the DWL-520 labeled A through E respectively. Versions A, B and E all use the prism 2/2.5 chipset while versions C and D use something that is unique and incompatible.
- Where's the firmware?
Okay, so let's assume you lucked out and purchased an older DWL-520 from the A, B era... if you did so, chances are you're probably reading this via WiFi right now. However, if you were one of the unfortunate chumps like yours truly, you purchased the newest version E from your local computer store. This doesn't seem like a big deal, except one little detail -- Version E doesn't seem to have a flash firmware. You see, in all other DWL-520 models the card comes equiped with the necessary firmware already in flash ram to make the device run. However, for reasons that I can't even comprehend, the DWL-520E does not. In fact, as near as I can tell it doesn't come with a Flash chip at all. Instead, the driver is expected to load the firmware from disk on every boot... why? I have no idea.. What I do know however is that there isn't a Prism2/2.5 driver that does this for Linux (as no other Prism card seems to do this, either).
So what does this all mean? Well, it means I wasted 7 hrs of my time because I was too stubborn to just buy a new card (when I knew it worked in Windows). It also means that unless you are buying a DWL-520 version A or B... something you can't even tell from the packaging as it doesn't appear to have changed in the entire product's life... you are simply wasting your time.
Get your act together D-Link, this is just crap.
