Belkin F5D6020 ver.2

The Belkin F5D6020 ver.2 is a PCMCIA 11 mbit wireless network card.

This version 2 card uses the Atmel chipset. It is supported by the atmel driver.

The general Linux support is not as good as Prism based cards (e.g. no network scanning), but it works quite well and has a good range and performance.

Note that the original F5D6020 (no version number) DID use the Atmel chipset but it's range was probably worse.

UPDATE
RedHat Fedora Core 2, Linux kernel version 2.6.*

Discovered that the correct Atmel drivers come pre-installed. You must edit /etc/pcmcia/config in two locations (instructions taken from Craig's Slackware & Mandrake page, link given below - thanks Craig).

1. After the line given for the AT&T WaveLAN Adapter insert (quotes included):

card "Belkin 802.11b F5D6020 v2 Wireless Notebook Network Card" manfid 0x01bf, 0x3302 bind "atmel_cs"

2. Save the changes to /etc/pcmcia/config.

3. now get the cardmgr daemon to re-read the configuration file by sending 'kill -s SIGHUP

4. check /var/log/messages to see if the configuration file was read correctly. If it wasn't then the errors I saw were easy to correct - generally I forgot a quote or inserted a spurious character.

5. insert the Belkin F5D6020 ver.2 802.11b card and again check /var/log/messages. You should now see the card has been properly initialized.

Debian sarge, Linux Kernel version 2.6.8

When I got this card from a friend, I did not know which driver to use and tried to look it up in the internet. I found people saying, that I have to recompile the kernel and compile the atmelwlandrivers. So I did this and it nearly worked, except that my Thinkpad crashed everytime I inserted the card. So I kept looking and found that others just inserted the card and it worked immediately. The solution was very simple and it goes like this:

I use a custom kernel-image-2.6.8XXX.deb.

Then I inserted the following in /etc/pcmcia/config: device "atmel_cs" class "network" module "atmel_cs" and further below: card "Belkin, 11Mbps-Wireless-Notebook-Network-Adapter" manfid 0x01bf, 0x3302 bind "atmel_cs"

One last thing I had to install was atmel-firmware for hotplug, a "non-free" debian-pkg. That was it, I guess. The rest of the configuration was like with every other card.