Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

Thanks for the input, Rob.  Let me just ask a couple of additional
questions for clarification.  Having already installed the pcmcia.tgz
package and gotten a "wired" NIC working in an old notebook, I decided to
just stick a wireless pcmcia NIC in to see what would happen.  This was an
older Lucent Wavelan card that I borrowed.  Well, when /etc/rc.d/rc.pcmcia
start was run, the card was, in fact, detected and a module loaded.
Running ifconfig showed it as wvlan0 I believe.  Let me ask: did the card
you tried work like this?  I.e., was it detected when the rc.pcmcia script
ran?  I was unable to get any traffic going over the connection, but got
an error when I tried to run dhcp (don't remember what the error was).  I
read later that there is an /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts file that needs some
lines uncommented for wireless connections to start working, but I don't
know if that's even relevant to BL2.  I gather from what you're saying
that, even with those lines uncommented, the card probably would still not
have worked since a certain kernel configuration option
(COFIG_NET_RADIO) is disabled in the BL2 kernel.  Is that right?  Anyway,
it seemed to me that I was pretty close to having it work, but knowing so
little about wireless networking and not all that much about Linux, that
perception may have been alot further from the truth than I thought.

James

On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Robert Steinmetz wrote:

> 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.
>
>