Belkin 54G PCI (F5D7000) and Linux (openSUSE 10.2)
My friend had a spare wireless card (Belkin F5D7000 Wireless G Desktop Network Card) PCI card lying around, and I decided to give it a shot and set it up, for experimental purposes. Yes, I’ll keep wearing my white hat, at least for now.
In the past I’ve played around with Wireless, in terms of breaking WEP keys, and watching and listening to kismet beep. Very childish stuff.
Initially the card didn’t work in openSUSE 10.2. As the card relied on the rt2500 module, I tried modprobe -i rt2500 to no success.
After looking at the openSUSE Network Adapters (Wireless) site, I discovered I needed to install from source. So I went to the projects site, and grabbed the lastest source (as of now v 1.1.0-b4).
Note: You need to grab the latest kernel source. Do this from the package manager. What you want is the package kernel-source. As of now (8th March 2007), openSUSE is running the 2.6.18.2 kernel.
New user instructions (each one line). Make sure to run as root:
tar -zxvf rt2500-1.1.0-b4.tar.gz
cd rt2500-1.1.0-b4/Module/
make
make install
modprobe -i rt2500
Now the card should be running perfectly fine.
If the module is loaded (execute: lsmod | grep rt2500 , if there is output, it has been loaded) and your still having problems, I suggest going to Yast > Network Devices > Network Card, and now you should see “Belkin F5D7000 Wireless G Desktop Network Card” under the available list of network cards.
Sadly the rt2500 driver won’t work in Master Mode, meaning I can’t create my own access point. I’ll keep trying to hack this, and maybe I’ll get something out of it. Monitor Mode, does work though, but that’s not as fun.
