Belkin F5D7050 v4000 Wireless G USB working solution!

After 48 hours of Mepis fun and wifi hell I have managed to get my Belkin F5D7050 (v4000) wireless G USB stick working.

You can be sure this is your version by typing lsusb at the konsole prompt and the ID is 050d:705c Belkin Components. Make sure this is your version of the Belkin F5D7050 (tiny white "v4000 uk" sticker on the back under the MAC address label) before you proceed otherwise there will be a lot of hair pulling and disappointment especially if you're a newbie like me.

This version of the F5D7050 has the ZyDAS ZD1211 chip. The Win driver that comes on the CD in the Belkin box does not work with ndiswrapper, if you have managed to get the win driver working in mepis, congratulations, how did you do it?! Previous F5D7050 sticks using RAlink chips work in ndiswrapper and probably linux native, but that is out of the scope of this topic.

You need to either have these files on CD but its also just as easy to shove a wire LAN card and do it. I used a cheapo billionton PCMCIA 10/100 PC Card cabled to an ethernet port on my wifi router. Mepis picked it up straight away, I ran mutilities started eth0 and I was online. Use your imagination and improvise another way if you can't do it the same way. Main point, to get these files: -

Open a konsole session.

at the prompt type> uname -r
You get some numbers. Enter them in the lotto if you're feeling lucky. I get>
2.6.15-26-386
which I will use in the example below, you must substitute it with whatever you get.

1. type this in konsole> apt-get install linux-source-2.6.15
(Note: I only used the first set of numbers before the hyphen)

Once thats through type in konsole> ln -s /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.15/ linux
That creates a link to the source files for anything that will want to look for it

2.type this in konsole> apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.15-26-386
(Note: this time I type in the full line of numbers I got when I typed uname -r in konsole)

Once thats through all the source files should be where they need to be for the next step.
Its worth checking that gcc is installed, I find it easy to run synaptic package manager (run synaptic) and search for gcc or g++, make sure they're installed on your system - they are C / C++ compilers. One or the other should be already installed by Mepis as default.

3. Now browse to http://zd1211.ath.cx/ and read the information for a couple of minutes. Download the latest driver (link to download page http://zd1211.ath.cx/download/ ). Save it to /usr/src/ then in konsole type> cd /usr/src/ and then type tar -zxvf followed by the name of the file you've just downloaded and press enter. E.g. in my case it was> tar -zxvf zd1211-driver-r83.tgz

4. Now type> cd zd1211-driver-r83 (or whatever the name of the new folder created by untarring the download) and then edit the file called makefile (I used konqueror browsed to /usr/src/zd1211-driver-r83/ and right click on makefile, open with kwrite), basically you need to follow the instructions on http://zd1211.ath.cx/ to replace the zero at the end of the line ZD1211REV_B=0 to 1, save the makefile file and then type> make
At this stage you may get errors thrown, just ignore them as long as the error is not related to can't find build directory - this means that something messed up in step 2. above. Try restarting your machine first then try this again. If restarting your machine didn't help then start from step 2 above. If that doesn't work I'm afraid my knowledge fades and you'll need to speak to a real Mepis expert (not me).

5. Ignoring any c related errors in the step above type> make install
This should end nicely and thats it. Almost there. Now type> modprobe -v zd1211b
then type> lsmod
you should see zd1211b in the list (means its loaded).

6. Jobs a good one if you've got this far. Now you can use mutilities to configure your network settings or the konsole way e.g.
ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 essid your-ssid
dhclient wlan0 (for a dhcp address, or I just punch a static IP using mutilities).

Done! Well almost. I could connect with a static IP but I couldn't receive or send any packets. I couldn't get a DHCP IP because I couldn't send any packets! What the heck?!

7. You have to go back to konsole and type> dmesg
A long list shoots down, scroll a bit up and you'll see zd1211:AllowedChannel = 000007ff or AllowedChannel = 000107ff

type> iwpriv wlan0 set_Region 2
(use 1 for USA, 2 for Europe, 3 for France, 4 for Japan, 5 for Israel, 6 for Mexico and if you live elsewhere then I don't know).

BINGO! All of sudden packets come in and out, you have wifi access!

Enjoy. And if this post helped you can buy me a beer.

Tony Goldsmith.

After 48 hours of Mepis fun and wifi hell I have managed to get my Belkin F5D7050 (v4000) wireless G USB stick working.

You can be sure this is your version by typing lsusb at the konsole prompt and the ID is 050d:705c Belkin Components. Make sure this is your version of the Belkin F5D7050 (tiny white "v4000 uk" sticker on the back under the MAC address label) before you proceed otherwise there will be a lot of hair pulling and disappointment especially if you're a newbie like me.

This version of the F5D7050 has the ZyDAS ZD1211 chip. The Win driver that comes on the CD in the Belkin box does not work with ndiswrapper, if you have managed to get the win driver working in mepis, congratulations, how did you do it?! Previous F5D7050 sticks using RAlink chips work in ndiswrapper and probably linux native, but that is out of the scope of this topic.

You need to either have these files on CD but its also just as easy to shove a wire LAN card and do it. I used a cheapo billionton PCMCIA 10/100 PC Card cabled to an ethernet port on my wifi router. Mepis picked it up straight away, I ran mutilities started eth0 and I was online. Use your imagination and improvise another way if you can't do it the same way. Main point, to get these files: -

Open a konsole session.

at the prompt type> uname -r
You get some numbers. Enter them in the lotto if you're feeling lucky. I get>
2.6.15-26-386
which I will use in the example below, you must substitute it with whatever you get.

1. type this in konsole> apt-get install linux-source-2.6.15
(Note: I only used the first set of numbers before the hyphen)

Once thats through type in konsole> ln -s /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.15/ linux
That creates a link to the source files for anything that will want to look for it

2.type this in konsole> apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.15-26-386
(Note: this time I type in the full line of numbers I got when I typed uname -r in konsole)

Once thats through all the source files should be where they need to be for the next step.
Its worth checking that gcc is installed, I find it easy to run synaptic package manager (run synaptic) and search for gcc or g++, make sure they're installed on your system - they are C / C++ compilers. One or the other should be already installed by Mepis as default.

3. Now browse to http://zd1211.ath.cx/ and read the information for a couple of minutes. Download the latest driver (link to download page http://zd1211.ath.cx/download/ ). Save it to /usr/src/ then in konsole type> cd /usr/src/ and then type tar -zxvf followed by the name of the file you've just downloaded and press enter. E.g. in my case it was> tar -zxvf zd1211-driver-r83.tgz

4. Now type> cd zd1211-driver-r83 (or whatever the name of the new folder created by untarring the download) and then edit the file called makefile (I used konqueror browsed to /usr/src/zd1211-driver-r83/ and right click on makefile, open with kwrite), basically you need to follow the instructions on http://zd1211.ath.cx/ to replace the zero at the end of the line ZD1211REV_B=0 to 1, save the makefile file and then type> make
At this stage you may get errors thrown, just ignore them as long as the error is not related to can't find build directory - this means that something messed up in step 2. above. Try restarting your machine first then try this again. If restarting your machine didn't help then start from step 2 above. If that doesn't work I'm afraid my knowledge fades and you'll need to speak to a real Mepis expert (not me).

5. Ignoring any c related errors in the step above type> make install
This should end nicely and thats it. Almost there. Now type> modprobe -v zd1211b
then type> lsmod
you should see zd1211b in the list (means its loaded).

6. Jobs a good one if you've got this far. Now you can use mutilities to configure your network settings or the konsole way e.g.
ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 essid your-ssid
dhclient wlan0 (for a dhcp address, or I just punch a static IP using mutilities).

Done! Well almost. I could connect with a static IP but I couldn't receive or send any packets. I couldn't get a DHCP IP because I couldn't send any packets! What the heck?!

7. You have to go back to konsole and type> dmesg
A long list shoots down, scroll a bit up and you'll see zd1211:AllowedChannel = 000007ff or AllowedChannel = 000107ff

type> iwpriv wlan0 set_Region 2
(use 1 for USA, 2 for Europe, 3 for France, 4 for Japan, 5 for Israel, 6 for Mexico and if you live elsewhere then I don't know).

BINGO! All of sudden packets come in and out, you have wifi access!

Enjoy. And if this post helped you can buy me a beer.

Tony Goldsmith.

I have been working on a similar problem.  I just downloaded and installed MEPIS last week.  I worked on it about 48 hours so far myself.  I too am a *nix newb.

I just posted a seperate thread for my issue here that has all of my particulars as well as a link to a thread I started over at mepis.org, but no one has been able to help me there.
http://www.mepislovers.com/forums/in...p?topic=2897.0

Also, why is your setup a wlan instead of ath0?  My mutilities shows my wireless=ath0 and says there is no wlan0 present.

[cookdav]

>>why is your setup a wlan instead of ath0? My mutilities shows my wireless=ath0
>>and says there is no wlan0 present.

Basically, there are TWO possible approaches to configuring a wireless-adapter in Linux.
(1) Using a 'native' Linux driver (if one exists that works for your hardware)
In this case, the device name will be 'eth', 'ath', 'ra' or whatever.

OR

(2) Using the special 'ndiswrapper' subsystem (which runs the Windows-supplied wireless driver).
In this case, the device name will become 'wlan0'

There are more details on all of this at:

http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.p...ess_connection

Hope this helps...

Dave

[Adrian]

I have a F5D7050, but it's not v4000, I made it work with modprobe rfcomm and then ifconfig rausb0 up in Windows I can't make it work (disclaimer: I lost only 30 minutes trying to make it work since I don't really need to use it in Windows, I'm sure I would eventually make it work)

I got mine working with WPA. When I switch back to the madwifi driver it worked. I know I tried that driver when I first started having problems getting this card to work, but I must of had something else wrong in my configs. Anyway, works like a champ now, so try it with the madwifi drivers. I used a pretty basic config file (wpa_supplicant.conf) and this command-line:

wpa_supplicant -Dmadwifi -iath0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

Good luck.

[JimC]

Originally Posted by Tony_Goldsmith

...This version of the F5D7050 has the ZyDAS ZD1211 chip.

I see where you compiled a driver to get it working. Did you try this first?

su
modprobe zd1211rw

I've got an SMCUSB-G adapter with a ZD1211 based chipset, and it works with the included zd1211rw driver already in Mepis 8. I remember needing to use modprobe zd1211rw to get it working with an earlier beta for some reason. Also, from time to time, I'll need to unplug it and plug it back in to get it working if it loses a weak signal with some routers for some odd reason. This adapter also seems to work fine with some of the other Debian Lenny based distros like Dreamlinux. I seem to remember using it with Mepis 7, too (but, I'd have to try it to make sure and that PC is tied up right now).

[anticapitalista]

Look at the date of the post JimC

[JimC]

Ooops....

I think I must have got to it via the "Similar Threads" feature while reading another thread about wireless. I guess I should play closer attention to the dates on those. :-)