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  • From: Robert Steinmetz <Rob AT steinmetznet.com>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] wireless networking and BL2
  • Date: Mon, 04 Aug 2003 15:21:56 -0500

James Miller wrote:

Someone was working a few months ago on getting a wireless PCMCIA NIC
going under BL, so that person may have some input on this issue. What
I'm wondering is what would be involved in getting wireless networking
enabled for BL2?
I tried to get BL2 to work with a wireless card on an old notebook and found problems getting X-windows to work with the old video chips, problems finding a 5v PCMCIA card which would work in the machine and other problems. I would have preferred to use BL for this I think it would have worked better but, I could not get the wireless networking to compile do yo library issues. I eventually got it to work on an early BL2 but performance was not acceptable even for my limited goal of an internet access terminal ( email and graphic browser). The graphic browser was the main problem, it just didn't work very well, I tried a lot of different ones. A text solution would have worked OK.

I've done a little bit of reading on it but am really
only starting to scratch the surface. I know that certain wireless NIC
modules are included in the pcmcia.tgz package,

Many of those are older cards, not easily found today. Many of the drivers also have limited functionality, including no encryption and other limitations.

but, to start with, I'm not sure if having the right module is all that is
involved in getting a
wireless NIC going? I read in some older posts on this issue that maybe
some feature ("radio_something"?) needs to be compiled into the kernel for
wireless to work.

The config option is called *CONFIG_NET_RADIO, *the kernel must be recompiled with this enabled.

Anyone with comments on that?

You may need to recompile the Wireless Tools, and find and compile the appropriate driver for you wireless chip set. This is necessary if you want to use a currently available card.

It has also occurred to me that, perhaps the easiest way to get wireless
networking going on BL2,
for the fairly limited occasions on which I might use it, would be to
boot with a network-aware, newer kernel? Further input on this, anyone?

The difficulty with this is that many of the other modules may not work correctly. The number of upgrades BL2 required eventually caused the machine to slow to a crawl. I suspect that I would have had performance problems with a newer kernel, even if I customized it and cut the size down. It depends largely on your target machine is. The newer the machine the more likely it is to run the more modern kernel.

--
Rob Steinmetz






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