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HOWTO: Use the D-Link DWL-121 in WinXP
Posted on Wednesday, April 06 @ 15:16:42 PDT by lincomatic
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The Rockford Fosgate OmniFi DMS1 & DMP1 audio players come with a curious D-Link USB WiFi (802.11b) WLAN device - the DWL-121 - which is not listed on D-Link's website. OmniMedia's support claims that it's a special model that only works w/ OmniFi products ... (yeah, sure, I believe that...) Is it possible to use it as a WiFi adapter for a Windows XP computer? The answer is yes... with the right driver and a tiny bit of tweaking...
D-Link doesn't provide drivers for the DWL-121, and doesn't even have any information about it on their website. When you plug it into a Windows computer, it comes up as an unknown device, manufactured by Inventec. The USB Vendor ID is 09AA, and the Product ID is 3642. Since Intersil's Prism chipset is one of the most popular, I took a guess that the DWL-121 must be Prism-based.
I went hunting for drivers on D-Link's site, and found that the driver for the DWL-122 - another USB WiFi adapter - is called PRISMUSB.sys. Good candidate. After modifying the INF to look for the correct VID/PID, I got the DWL-122 driver to install and it worked! I'm actually posting this article through the DWL-121 right now! Below is the installation procedure:
1) Download the DWL-122 driver from this page.
2) unzip it into a folder, say c:/tmp
3) open up c:/tmp/Drivers/WinXP/NETPRISM.INF in a text editor, such as Notepad.
4) Do a global replace of the string "VID_2001&PID_3700" with "VID_09AA&PID_3642"
5) If you're really anal, you can also replace "DWL-122" with "DWL-121," but this is entirely optional, since it only affects the name of the device as XP displays it.
6) plug in the DWL-121 and when the Hardware Update Wizard comes up, select Install from a list or specific location.
7) on the next screen, select Don't search. I will choose the driver to install.
8) on the next screen, click the Have Disk button, and enter the path to the modified INF file, e.g. c:/tmp/Drivers/WinXP and click Next
Follow the default prompts for the rest of the installation, and you're done! Though I haven't tested it, the same procedure should work with other versions of Windows; just substitute WinXP with the appropriate directory name for your target OS.
Though I haven't tried it yet, it should also work fine in Linux with any Prism-compatible driver, such as linux-wlan.
FOOTNOTE: The DMS1/DMP1 force us to compromise the security of our wireless networks by using Shared Key Authorization due to their crappy firmware, not because of limitations in the D-Link hardware. After hooking up the DWL-121 to my lappy, I tried switching my AP back to Open Key Auth., and it WORKS!
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