Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

I have an AmbiCom WL54-CF B/G wireless card that a Windows driver was released for.



The driver is for Windows XP. Unfortunately I'm not pushing my TransNote past 2000. You can plug the card in and load their driver and it gives the "this device cannot start" message in the device manager. HOWEVER it seems that there's more going on inside the card. By default Windows sees it as a Marvell 88W8300.



Supposedly a Windows 2000 driver exists for this chipset but everything I have found so far directs me to the Marvell Libertas or 8335 chipset and so far every version of the driver I have found for that either does not work or it's that cruddy "download this shady driver software that asks you to buy stuff and say we don't have the driver unless you buy it."

Was pulling strings with an AmbiCom subsidiary and it got to a point where they just emailed me the source code for the driver.
Okay, that's another way to make this work. Take the XP driver and find out why it doesn't work in 2000.

Unfortunately my driver skills are non-existant. The code is a also confusing. the batch files all refernce CE but form time to time I find mentions of NT32 or Windows32.

-snipped-

I haven't touched WindowsNT driver code since before the year 2000. It kinda sucked.. Oh wait thats not entirely true, in Japan I was digging around in Microsofts own code for 2003 server (via remote link to Redmond).Actually that was more so my Japanese boss, and we were arguing technical aspects while referencing the blue screen stack trace and the source for W2k3 and the source of device driver in question and RDPing into another box on the other side of the planet...

Anyways....
* I am not entirely sure that AmbiCom would appreciate you distributing their driver code to all and sundry.
* Kinda surprised that Recondas or maybe Pete hasn't jumped on you for posting it.
* Try root canal... its kinda more fun than digging around in Windows driver code.
* I seem to remember a book on NT driver development by Art Baker or was it Barker propping up a monitor when I was doing device driver stuff in the mid 1990s... I am sure there are miles of reference materials these days.
* You are the one with the problem with the device, I debug driver code on real devices, without a real device I am kinda spinning my wheels. I don't have a WIndows 2000 box, I suspect not many people would. At the very least you need I think Visual Studio, not sure of the version and then you should set up a build/test environment and hook up a second machine for kernel debugging and then break point the driver initialization routines from the second machine, I forget, was it OnLoad then OnRegister or something like that. Then you should step through the code until you see it return an error condition, then you look back up immediately before that and see why. Then you comment stuff out or fix it... Or is this a userland VxD-like driver..? (I've not bothered to look at the source you posted)...

Wouldn't it be easier to just run it on a new WindowsXP machine and forget about porting it...? It could take days, weeks or months and that is when you know what you are doing that much I can (barely) remember..

R.

Well even though they literally mailed me the code, I'll snip it out and ask elsewhere.
You CAN run XP on the TransNote however it's like bulking up a Powermac 6100 to run system 8 or force it into System 9. You can do it but the hardware limitations are going to REALLY cut down on what the computer can do.