This guide will help you get the Netgear WG511 wireless card working under linux. The paths stated here are from SusE linux, but they should work for other distrobutions. If they do not, do a find command to locate them. This guide was taken from http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/showproduct.php?product=114 which is a good reference for any questions you may have out of the scope of this guide.

First off, this card has gone through revisions and the chipset has changed. If you look at the UPC on the bottom and the card was made in Taiwan, this guide will work since the PRISM54 drivers work with the card. If it is made in China, this guide will not work. If possible, take it back and look for one made in Taiwan.
Command you will type in are in BOLD, ITALICS mean your infomation will be different than mine. I assume you are using a command terminal and VI editor.

  1. Download "http://prism54.org/~mcgrof/firmware/1.0.4.3.arm" and rename 1.0.4.3.arm to isl3890
  2. Create  /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/  directory if it doesn't exist
  3. Move isl3890 to the new directory.
  4. Create /etc/load_wireless script to load at startup. - credit to David Cafaro
    5.     
#!/bin/bash
# Note you may have to change all references to eth1 to eth0 if you do not have another network card already installed
# Dry start to load firmware
echo -n "Bringing up wireless card..."
/sbin/ifconfig eth1 up
# Wait a sec to make sure it's good and loaded
sleep 2
# Now really load it
/usr/sbin/iwconfig eth1 essid [SSID SET IN ROUTER] key [WEP KEY SET IN ROUTER]
# For DHCP, use the following two lines, and comment the two below it
/sbin/ifdown eth1
/sbin/ifup eth1
# For manually setting the IP, comment the two lines above and un-comment the next two lines
#/sbin/ifconfig eth1 192.168.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0
#/sbin/route add default gw 192.168.0.1
echo "done"
  5. Make /etc/load_wireless executable:
  6. Test your script:
  7. Put a call to this script in your rc.local if you want to automatically load the wireless card at boot.