I've been trying for almost a week to get my Netgear MA311 wireless pci card to configure and become operational but NOTHING works! I bought this card because wvlan-linux said it used prism2 so I thought it wouldn't be that much trouble. I've tried it under Mdk 10 with the 2.6 and 2.4 kernel, I've tried it under Mdk 9, Fedora Core1, Morphix Gnome, Kanotix, Knoppix STD, Damn small, and nothing makes this card work! I go:
 
modprobe orinoco_pci
 
which returns no errors
 
then:
 
iwconfig eth0 mode ad-hoc nick "" essid "dapper" channel 6
ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.105
ifconfig eth0 up
 
The light on the card stops flashing at this point but iI cannot connect.
I've tried it on eth1 and eth0, and neither works.
 
This is very frustrating in that I've read on line where others report this card working, but when I try the methods they say, it still will not work!
Hell, I even installed Windows 98 to see if I could get it working with it! Although I didn't know how to make it connect to the internet, the Netgear setup utility DID see my Linksys Wireless G router so there shouldn't be anything wrong with the card itself.
 
The Linksys wireless G works well with the Orinoco gold card in my wife's Toshiba laptop right out of the box as it is backwards compatible with 802.11b.
 
I'm out of ideas here and am grasping at straws. ANYTHING that anyone might be able to contribute that may help me figure this out, please let me know!!
 
Thanks
 
Dapper Dan