acx-mac80211 in Puppy 4.1.2

[idiot69]

Following tempestuous's suggestion in a beginners forum thread, I reverted to 4.1.2 with the 2.6.25.16 kernel to get my wireless card to work, having failed in my attempts to get the acx-mac80211 driver to compile in 4.3.1.

My wireless card is recognised, but I'm getting a message saying that WPA is not supported. My card does support WPA2 under windows, and I thought that the mac80211 module was supposed to support WPA.

Is this a firmware issue, or an issue with the version of the acx-mac80211 driver included with Puppy 4.1.2? Or even just a version with the wizard (?is that part of wicd?)? I've seen some mention about people only being able to configure WPA through the console, rather than any GUI, but I wouldn't know where to start with that.

Thanks

[Patriot]

Hmmm .....

I encountered a TI acx111 before ..... In my case, the best driver for wpa2 connections was and still is ndiswrapper (with driver TI tnet1130 v7.0.1.33) ... This particular version has a working and stable wpa2 firmware. (The TI acx100 does not support wpa.)

I wrestled with the free acx111 drivers before but the only one that works stable (wpa2) at more than 100 feet is .... yeah, ndiswrapper. YMMV ...


Rgds

[idiot69]

Thanks.

I'm using a Dlink DWL-G650+, and whenever I tried to point ndiswrapper to the gplus.inf file in my windows folder, I get the error "invalid driver". This has been the case with several distros.

Do you have a link to download the drivers you had success with (I tried googling, but not much success with the search string specified)?

[Patriot]

Hmmm .....

Ok, the dwl650+ drivers are older at v6.0.0.18 .... Attached is the tar.gz driver v7.0.1.33 that I use previously. Give it a shot if you want ...


Rgds

[idiot69]

Thanks very much.

That seems to work under 4.3.1. Will have to wait a bit to see how stable it is, but so far so good.

Thanks again.

[tempestuous]

My wireless card is recognised, but I'm getting a message saying that WPA is not supported.

Yes, that's the fault of Puppy's Network Wizard not keeping up with newer (or uncommon) wifi drivers.
The Linux acx-mac80211 driver is, in fact, WPA-compatible. You just need to modify the Network Wizard's configuration file to define the acx-mac80211 driver as WPA-compatible.

Open /usr/sbin/wag-profiles.sh in Geany. At line 283 you will see this -

Code: Select all

ath5k*|b43|b43legacy|bcm43xx) CARD_WPA_DRV="wext" ;;

To the start of that line add "acx*|" (without quotation marks) so it looks like this -

Code: Select all

acx*|ath5k*|b43|b43legacy|bcm43xx) CARD_WPA_DRV="wext" ;;

Now run the Network Wizard and you should be good.

I just caution that the acx-mac80211 driver never achieved full maturity, so it may be less than stable, especially with WPA encryption.
The harsh reality is that TI ACX wifi devices are not an ideal choice under Linux.