> I'm having real difficulty setting up WLAN connectivity in Linux on my
> new ECS Desknote, and I'd love some help. The device is an AirVast
> PRISM3 card, internally connected on a hidden USB bus. The VID/PID are

In case anyone cares, there is an acceptable workaround to my problem,
which I discovered after considerable trial-n-error: First, you must
disable "check for sleep in spinlock" checking in the kernel. It
fights with the wlan-ng driver.

Second, it appears that the net device won't connect properly at boot.
It's very unclear why this is the case, but if you initialize the
interface at boot time, you'll get either no link, or a link with ~50%
packet loss. The cure for this is to run a script very late in the
boot process:

#!/bin/sh
rmmod prism2_usb
rmmod p80211
sleep 1
modprobe prism2_usb
sleep 5
ifup wlan0

Thirdly, this specific WLAN adapter can get into a confused state that
can only be cleared with a power-cycle (In this state, even Windows
can't recognize it). Since it's not possible to unplug the device,
being internal, the only way to clear this condition is to power down
and remove the AC adapter from the notebook for a couple of seconds.
It seems that while the AC adapter is connected, sufficient current is
available at the USB ports (even with the machine off) to keep the
WLAN adapter confused.