Instructions are based and extended on the instruction found on http://acx100.sourceforge.net/wiki/ACX

The ZyXEL PCI card is using the Texas Instruments ACX 111 chipset. There is a great open source project located at http://acx100.sourceforge.net providing drivers for Linux users.
Although it might be possible to use the NdisWrapper project, you might have problems finding a working windows driver if you have a 64bit processor (which I do). (As of the date of this blog entry, ZyXEL has no 64bit driver for this card).

The ACX100 project should work with both 32- and 64-bit systems.

The Installation requires

• Downloading the Source
• Downloading Kernel Source
• Downloading Firmware
• Compiling Source
• Configuration

Downloading the Source

Run the following commands as root

Downloading Kernel Source

Most probably its already on your machine, if not run

Downloading Firmware

Download and install the firmware with the following commands

Compiling Source

I found that I had to modify the sources a tiny bit to only compile the PCI parts by commenting out the USB parts, in order to get things to work.

Edit the following line in /usr/src/acx-20051202/Makefile

And in /usr/src/acx-20051202/acx_config.h, edit the following line Now compile with (Note the difference between back ticks ` and single quote ')

Configuration and Installation

The following instructions assumes the new wireless device is called wlan0, if you are installing multiple devices, replace wlan0 with the device name you'd prefer.

Load the driver with If this looks ok and dmesg looks ok too, then the driver was successfully loaded into the kernel and the driver is ready to be installed under /lib All modules installed under /lib/modules/... get loaded at startup. However if the module file (in our case acx.ko) is not executable it seems it is not getting loaded. The install script above copies the acx.ko file to /lib/modules/<kernel-version>/extra/acx.ko but without the proper execution bit. Therefore you must do Next, edit /etc/modprobe.conf and add the following line This will tell your system that there exists a wireless card with the acx.ko driver.

Next type Click New in the upper left corner and basically follow the GUI wizard, here are screen shots of the first few steps. After the final step the system is gonna try connect to your wireless network. Don't get discouraged if it doesn't work right away, just continue reading.






If the wizard fails to connect, try the following and compare the channel id with the one found in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0

Where I live, this is what iwlist wlan0 scan returns This is the ifcfg-wlan0 file I ended up with After editing your ifcfg-wlan0 file you don't have to restart your computer, just type which gives better visual feedback over Note the ONBOOT=yes which will enable your wireless each time you boot up your machine.

Other References

http://www.houseofcraig.net/acx100_howto.php

Did it Work?

It would be nice to hear if my efforts in writing up my experiences with this card are helping others. Please feel free to post a comment or email me if it did.