Netgear MA401 on Linux

This is my old card called 802.11b Wireless PC Card. It's an 16Bit PCMCIA card with the model name MA401. A small label on the backside calls it Rev. D.

Here is what cardctl ident says :

product info: "NETGEAR MA401RA Wireless PC", "Card", "ISL37300P", "Eval-RevA"
manfid: 0x000b, 0x7300
function: 6 (network)hh

The card has a Prism 2.5 chipset which is well supported by various drivers including the Kernels orinoco_cs and the hostap driver. I used it with the latter one and upgraded the firmware following Jun Sun's HOWTO. The card workes fine for some time but then suddenly freezes. Even ejecting and reinserting doesn't help. This occurs under Windows as well.

To get the cardmanager to recognize the card put this in your /etc/pcmcia/local.conf. For the host_ap driver just replace orinoco_cs with hostap_cs.

card "NETGEAR MA401RA Wireless PC"
  manfid 0x000b, 0x7300
  bind "orinoco_cs"

I was not able to get it running on Kernel 2.6.7. The orinoco_cs driver was unable to read it's MAC address and took the firmware version for 0.0.0 . The hostap driver did compile but froze the whole machine on inserting the card.