Is usbid of a wireless adapter sufficient to conclude it will work in Linux?

linuxbee · #1 7th March 2010, 12:17 AM

I have a wireless usb-adapter with usbid:

Code:

Bus 001 Device 003: ID 1690:0711 Askey Computer Corp. [hex] SMCWUSBT-G (no firmware)

I have heard that the second number after ":" above gives info about the chipset included in the adapter.
It turns out this adapter has an atheros 5523 chipset.
My question is if the product id 0711 above is the only thing determining if the adapter will work with Linux?
If so, i can find in the file modules.usbmap that zd1211rw supports this chipset:

Code:

 less modules.usbmap | grep 0711
zd1211rw             0x0003      0x1435   0x0711    0x0000       0x0000       0x00         0x00  ...

though it is associated with a different vendor id which is 0x1435. In this case, should i manually associate this driver with this adapter?

You might ask why bother tweaking the OS?. The reason is that neither Fedora detected this thing as a wireless adapter nor ndiswrapper was able to install the windows driver (I think the problem is Fedora is 64 bit but win driver is 32 bit).

Nokia · #2 7th March 2010, 12:27 AM

Did you try installing ath_info and ar9170-firmware ?

linuxbee · #3 8th March 2010, 04:49 AM

ar9170-firmware exits in the current kernel.
also ath_info has something to do with PCI I think.
Thanks though. I am not sure if this thread is well posed in its title. I will discard this thread (if i can) and create a new one specifically for the atheros 5523 chipset and corresponding firmware thing.