Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[jakfish]

Even though I don't use puppy 2, I've been reading this thread and feel badly at how it's ending.

When hard-working folks use their time to design key pets for others, the community does owe a response to say if the pets function or not.

That said, tempestuous, your work is legendary and I know many users, starting with me, are eternally grateful. The eee pets you made for puppy 4.* have made me a puppy user for life--you made wifi, fan control, etc. available, and had you not, many, many eee users would've moved on to another flavor of linux.

You built a subcommunity, and thank you for it,
Jake

[ecomoney]

Users requiring alchemy? Yes that sounds about right. Many users are totally unaware of what wireless hardware there is inside their computers. Puppy is a linux distro for beginners so thats to be expected.

How would someone discover what hardware they have or drivers they need?

[01micko]

[01micko]

[tempestuous]

Thanks for your words of support Jake and Mick, but I don't desire a pat on the back.
I simply want the forum to be an informational resource, rather than a worthless repository of random guesswork, and a convenient excuse for new users to claim that Linux is unworkable.

[tempestuous]

Here are the hfs and hfsplus modules, for Macintosh filesystem support.

[mawebb88]

[tempestuous]

Oct 20 2009:
Ralink rt2860sta wifi driver just updated to ver 2.2.0.0
in earlier post.

[tempestuous]

The Realtek RTL8180 wifi chipset, for PCI and Cardbus wifi devices, is supported in older Linux kernels by the r8180 driver from http://rtl8180-sa2400.sourceforge.net/
But the rtl8180-sa2400 source code failed to compile against the 2.6.18.1 kernel when this new kernel first appeared with the release of Puppy v2.12, so Barry didn't include this driver at that time.
Shortly afterwards, forum member kirk located upgraded source code and Barry added the driver for Puppy v2.13 or v2.14, and that's the version of driver which carries forward today in Puppy 2.14X.
I have just discovered, however, that Barry only included 3 kernel modules from this driver package, and missed the 4th module; ieee80211_crypt_wep-r8180.
This probably means that unencrypted wifi connections would have worked OK with this driver, but WEP-encrypted connections would have failed.

I now attach a dotpet package with the full complement of modules.
After installing this dotpet, reboot.
Be aware that this driver is far from stable, and sometimes requires some extra configuration steps to get it working.
The WEP-related module may fail to load automatically, and at least one of the encryption-related modules (crc32c) may also fail to load. So before establishing a wifi connection with the Network Wizard, run these 2 commands -

[tempestuous]

D-Link DWL-520 rev E (PCI) and DWL-650 rev P (cardbus)

These two wifi devices contain the "SSF" variant of the Prism3 wifi chipset, supported by the hostap_pci/hostap_cs drivers, but this Prism3-SSF chipset also requires external firmware. Puppy 214 already contains the necessary firmware, but it cannot be loaded by the conventional hotplug or udev processes.
The unique method required will be explained shortly, but apart from this, I have just discovered that these two wifi devices cannot possibly work in Puppy 214 because:
i) The firmware-loading function of the hostap_pci/hostap_cs drivers are not enabled in the Puppy 214 kernel configuration.
ii) The device ID's for the DWL-650revP are not properly defined in the hostap_cs source code in Puppy214. Thus the DWL-650revP would be unrecognised, and the driver would fail to load.

I have now compiled the hostap_pci and hostap_cs drivers for Puppy 214 suitably patched and configured for external firmware support.
After installing this dotpet, reboot. Puppy should automatically detect your device and load the hostap_pci or hostap_cs driver. Check with the "lsmod" command. Now run these 4 commands to load the firmware -

[sfeeley]

I know this is an old thread, but maybe somebody will pick up and help.

I downloaded the pet for the rt2860 and tried applying it to tuuxxx's 2.14x (on an old sony viao laptop, 256Ram; 256 swap)

I was able to load the module and it detected the device (a belkin f5d8013 wireless card).. However, it was unable to detect any wireless networks.

As a side note:
On another computer, I was able to use ndiswrapper to use the windows driver for this card (rt2860.inf). But for some reason, it won't allow me to copy that driver from computer A to computer B and then successfully use ndiswrapper.

I'd appreciate any help getting this card working. Thanks.

[tempestuous]

The Orinoco wifi chipset is a very early B-mode wifi device, generally well-supported in Puppy by the standard kernel drivers for PCI and PCMCIA variants.
But the very rare USB variants of this wifi device have only ever been supported by an experimental driver; orinoco_usb
orinoco_usb dotpet now attached.

I obtained the source code from
https://orinoco.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/orinoco/branches/usb/

[jim3630]

Hi, do you have a broadcom wl.ko driver pet for this kernel?

[tempestuous]

Here is the proprietary "wl" Broadcom wifi driver.
Be aware that this driver is likely to compete with the standard "bcm43xx" driver already in Puppy 2.14-2.16.
You will need to blacklist, or fully disable the bcm43xx driver before the proprietary driver will work.
To fully disable the old driver, use ROX to go to /lib/modules/2.6.18.1/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/bcm43xx/
and shift the "bcm43xx.ko" file to somewhere like /root
Now run this command -

[jim3630]