I need to keep up to date on the
orinoco_plx driver, because it is still buggy, and also on USB networking,
specifically Prism II via USB, none of which are in the current production
kernel. According to
a web page of uncertain recentness, the Linksys USB10TX and USB100TX
wired Ethernet controllers, plus a lot of others, use the ADMtek Pegasus
chipset. pegasus.o works with wired Ethernet USB interfaces from
10 different vendors.
From ADMtek's
product announcement for the ADM8511 ``Pegasus II'': it includes an
integrated fast-Ethernet PHY, connected to a 12 Mbps USB interface, and
an on-chip 24K cache buffer. It is similar to the AN986 (discontinued?) but has
more stuff on-chip.
Not sure what a PHY is, but context suggests the physical or MAC layer
controller.
They say it has a Linux driver at http://www.dce.bg/~petkan. (Check out the ``hobby'' pictures; this guy is insane.)
The referenced driver is in the Linux kernel as
drivers/usb/pegasus.c, and is advertised as working on both Pegasus and
Pegasus II.
Someone bought a USB wireless NIC, and it turns out to be a standard
PCMCIA card stuck in a Lucent PCMCIA to USB adaptor (using a Cypress ASIC).
David Gibson suggests that the Hermes driver would be the right place to
start working on writing a driver for it. A web search revealed thousands
of USB to PCMCIA adaptors (stick it in your PCMCIA slot, plug a USB device
into the dongle), but none of the other polarity. There is a driver for
the SpeedTouch DSL modem with USB output, so there's the networking layer,
but it's not clear how to put all these bits together.