Hi,

Thanks for your page, which I found very useful as it seems to be
pitched at just the right level for someone (me) who doesn't know their
PDA from their CIS!

If you publish this, could I ask you to please obfuscate or remove my
email address, as I get a lot of spam (who doesn't?).

I've just loaded the RAM-based firmware on my Netgear MA701, having had
problems with the card's old firmware.

Wi-Fi card: MA701 Netgear CF wireless adaptor
Platform: Sharp Zaurus SL-5500

The back of the card says:

H/W: V0.5
F/W: V1.3.6
 CH: 13

At some point last year, I installed station firmware 1.7.4 on it - I
think I used Angstrom ( www.angstrom-distribution.org ) on my SL-C860
Zaurus, which I no longer have.  Ever since that time, the card's been
dropping packets and occasionally losing association with the access
point.

'hostap_diag wlan0' returns the following with the problematic firmware:

NICID: id=0x800c v1.0.0 (PRISM II (2.5) PCMCIA (SST parallel flash))
PRIID: id=0x0015 v1.1.1
STAID: id=0x001f v1.7.4 (station firmware)

Earlier this month I decided to do something about it, but I am using a
different system now: SL-5500 Zaurus (Collie) with OpenZaurus 3.5.4. 
This is very old now, but Matthias Hentges' mirror is still available.
 
I installed hostap-utils with:
  ipkg -nodeps -d root install hostap-utils_0.4.7-r3_arm.ipk

Download this from:
http://mirror.hentges.net/www.openzaurus.org/3.5.4.1/feed/base/hostap-utils_0.4.7-r3_arm.ipk

Unfortunately, any attempt to load non-volatile firmware resulted in an
error:

Downloading to non-volatile memory (flash).
Note! This can take about 30 seconds. Do _not_ remove card during
download.
Odd.. Download request for the kernel driver failed.
Are you sure you have compiled (and loaded the correct version of)
hostap.o module with PRISM2_DOWNLOAD_SUPPORT definition in
driver/module/hostap_config.h?
In addition, non-volatile download requires PRISM2_NON_VOLATILE_DOWNLOAD
to be defined.
ioctl[PRISM2_IOCTL_DOWNLOAD]: Operation not supported

Download failed!

My hostap driver is from 0.4.7, from 20th Nov. 2005.  I think that
recompilation of the driver is all that is necessary, but I do not have
the kernel source code, patches or toolchain to build against this old
kernel (2.4.18-rmk7-pxa3-embedix) so that is not currently an option. 
Instead, I tried non-volatile loading, and it worked, though I'm not
sure if I'm doing this correctly.  This failed without the '-O
/proc/net/hostap/wlan0/pda' option.

cardctl eject
cardctl insert
ifconfig wlan0 down
prism2_srec -g wlan0 ak010101.hex -O /proc/net/hostap/wlan0/pda
prism2_srec -r wlan0 rf010800.hex -O /proc/net/hostap/wlan0/pda
ifconfig wlan0 up

hostap_diag now says:

NICID: id=0x800c v1.0.0 (PRISM II (2.5) PCMCIA (SST parallel flash))
PRIID: id=0x0015 v1.1.1
STAID: id=0x001f v1.8.0 (station firmware)

That appears to work and the card's performance is now much better.  The
only drawback, of course, is that I need to remember to reload the
firmware on initialising the card, because it's not done automatically.

Lex Landa