I'm struggling to get the embedded wireless card in this laptop to work. In 7.10 (gutsy) it worked fine. Now I'm trying to get 10.10 (maverick) working on it, and am using the Lubuntu flavour due to the low resources of this laptop.

The hardware: Appears to be an embedded pcmcia card. pccardctl ident gives:

Socket 0:
  product info: "TOSHIBA", "Wireless LAN Card", "Version 01.01", ""
  manfid: 0x0156, 0x0002
  function: 6 (network)

The default kernel recognises the card and loads the orinoco_cs driver.

orinoco_cs 0.0: Hardware identity 0005:0002:0001:0002
orinoco_cs 0.0: Station identity 001f:0001:0006:000e
orinoco_cs 0.0: Firmware determined as Lucent/Agere 6.14

Then for some reason, the driver isn't happy with this and gives:

orinoco_cs 0.0: Hardware identity 0005:0002:0001:0002
orinoco_cs 0.0: Station identity 001f:0002:0009:0030
orinoco_cs 0.0: Firmware determined as Lucent/Agere 9.48

All seems ok until I try to associate with my access point using Network Manager.

eth1: Lucent/Agere firmware doesn't support manual roaming

repeated about 10 times then NM gives up.

According to the linuxwireless.org wiki page on this driver, this is a known issue, and I quote:

Known issues

Roaming and WPA_supplicant

Lucent/Agere firmware doesn't support manual roaming

On the Agere cards, roaming is controlled by the firmware instead of userspace. You will get the above message if userspace attempts to associate with a specific AP rather than by SSID.

If you are using wpa_supplicant use ap_scan=2 mode.

NetworkManager uses wpa_supplicant, so the above also applies.

At this point my google-fu has failed me, and I can't find how to configure network manager to use the mystical "ap_scan=2" mode via wpa_supplicant.

I have tried the following suggested solutions (from launchpad or the forums)

• deleting the agere* files from /lib/firmware
• using wicd instead of network manager
• combining both
• blacklisting the orinoco_cs driver in an attempt to force use of the hostap_cs driver instead (in case it is a prism2 card).

Obviously none of them have worked for me.

Any hints on how to perform the suggested workaround above?

Edit: I have also confirmed working on 8.10 (intrepid) live CD.