Baslinux mailing list

[Robert Steinmetz <Rob AT steinmetznet.com>]

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