Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[MikeLockmoore]

[ Now online WIRELESSLY with Puppy 2.14!!! See latest posts below.]

Hello folks. I am able to get on the net just fine with Puppy 2.12 using a machine hard-wired to my wireless AP/router (Dlink DI-524 AirPlus G). The trouble is with my secondary PC which has a Zyxel g-302v2 Wifi PCI card. This has the TI ACX (TNET1130) chipset.

I have tried the Puppy Wireless networking wizard to configure things, trying both the built-in ACX driver and loading in my Windows XP .INF with the NDISWrapper. Both approaches show that the wlan0 device is present and detects my WLAN network, but neither seems to work when I try a DHCP request, or I statically assign an IP (same as what the machine normally gets when it boots into Windows XP).

When I view the D-Link AP/router's internal log, I can see that my Puppy computer is associated with the AP, with the correct MAC and a fresh timestamp. But I can't PING the Puppy PC from another PC in the LAN, nor can I PING from Puppy to the router or another PC in my home LAN. And, of course, I don't have any web or other networking functions either. This pretty frustrating because I seem so close!

Here is a dump of ifconfig, iwconfig, route, ping, and some of my kernel messages.

[MikeLockmoore]

I did a bit more research and dug up this person's observations about getting my type of WiFi card to work with Ubuntu:

[MikeLockmoore]

Well, I am still not having any luck with Puppy on wireless. My original post in this thread was based on trying to get my secondary desktop PC running a Puppy 2.12 Live CD to use its Zyxel wireless card.

Since then, I have installed Puppy 2.12 on my Windows XP laptop using the excellent "Lin'N'WinNewB"(http://www.icpug.org.uk/national/linnwin/step01-4steps.htm) instructions. I am posting this with that laptop using a hard-wired connection to my wireless AP/router (eth0). It is working great. But this laptop has a Linsys PCMCIA Wifi adapter that uses the same TI ACX chipset as the Zyxel card, and I am having the same kinds of problems getting any connectivity working over WiFi.

I can't ping other machines in my WiFi LAN, and I can't even ping the router. The initial ROUTE table looks reasonable, and the DMESG statements show the laptop has associated with the router. When I view the router's packet statistics (using a web interface on another PC) during a ping attempt, I can see the wireless packet count increasing at a moderate pace, even though all the packets seem to get dropped. When I break out of the ping, the wireless packet rate drops off sharply, so something is going on.

Please, I hope someone out there has a suggestion to help me diagnose the problem! Thanks.

[BarryK]

No, don't delete the acx kernel module. In pup 2.12, at next boot puppy
will just go and fetch it again from the "zdrv" drivers file (after all, he
is a playful puppy dog!).

The easiest thing would be to unmount it. Add this to /etc/rc.d/rc.local:
rmmod acx

[marksouth2000]

How do you hard-wire your connections, BTW? Also, I'm curious to understand why Cat5 cable doesn't work for you? Government spying??

It sounds fascinating, anyway.

[MikeLockmoore]

Thanks Barry for the suggestion to use rmmod. I'll do that and see if the NDISWrapper-based device driver behaves any better with my Wifi cards and home network.

The fact that I don't see any error-type messages using DMESG and that my router is getting some kind of wireless packets from my associated PCs leads me to believe it is not the ACX or NDISWrapper driver that is the problem, but I don't know enough so far about the IP route mechanism including forwarding & masquarading to tell if I have a problem with that side of things.

MarkSouth2000: The only reason I use wireless is convenience and cost. My "main" desktop PC is hard-wired into my WirelessAP/router device. I _can_ plug more computers into the router with CAT5 cable, but the secondary desktop PC is far enough away a CAT5 cable would cost about the same if not more than the WiFi card and would be uglier (without running cable behind a baseboard or something). And the point of a laptop (my 3rd machine) is to move it around, right?

Anyway, both the desktop PC with Zyxel card and the Laptop with the Linksys PCMCIA card connect easily and work well over WiFi when using Windows XP (home edition on the desktop and pro on the laptop). Puppy 2.12 connects perfectly from my laptop and from my main PC when they are wired with CAT5 from the Ethernet port to the wireless router, so it seems like I am close to having a WiFi-enabled Puppy. I just need to find and set the "make it work" bit somewhere.

So the bottom line is: I don't want to leash my Puppies with CAT5 if I don't have to!

[MikeLockmoore]

Unfortunately, I am not much farther along.

I was able to remove the acx module as Barry suggested, but when I tried to load the NDIS module, NDISWrapper cannot load a file (I think it is the ACX 111 firmware file that goes into the card's chipset). Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get this to work properly? I don't think the "memory allocation" problem in the kernel messages is related to my main system RAM (which has over 100 MB free), but probably the EEPROM on the Zyxel card. Here is a DMESG dump:

[tempestuous]

In /lib/firmware you could rename the existing tiacx111c16 file, then replace it with the alternative version 1.2.0.30 listed here http://acx100.sourceforge.net/wiki/Firmware

[marksouth2000]

[MikeLockmoore]

tempestuous: Thanks for a very good idea to try. I tried it with both 1.2.0.30 and 1.2.1.34 versions. I verified in /proc/dirver/acx_wlan0* that the firmware revision was the intended level. Unfortunately, both versions of firmware behaved the same as before... the card appears to just dump all wireless packets it receives into the "bit bucket". Maybe there is an IRQ conflict or some other reason the card never notifies the main system that it has received data? I might try the different firmware version on my laptop with the Linksys card, but I don't have high hopes at this point.

MarkSouth2000: Sorry my terminology was confusing. While I used to dabble in building hardware at the wires / resistors / chips level, my computer network at home is pretty ordinary stuff right now. Unfortunately, I won't get to play with Puppy too much if I can't network my secondary PCs with it easily... the main PC is shared with my DW, who has a lot of Windows-specific stuff to do on it frequently.

[Puppynewbie]

Mike,

Did you ever get your ZyCel working?

I too have the same card.

[MikeLockmoore]

[MikeLockmoore]

In the process of doing some vesafb graphics experiments, I took a "fresh" 2.14 CD (just the ISO image) and booted Puppy on my PC with a wireless card. After doing the poking around for the graphics experiment, I tried "just for fun" the wireless networking wizard in Puppy 2.14. Much to my delight it worked!

Being able to get it online with my wireless card, I wanted to make a new multi-session CD specifically for use with this PC. Unfortunately, the new CD did not work for wireless. Same general symptoms as before, so I didn't go much further until I saw a comment in this thread (http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=16773) that multi-session installations are more problematic.

I went back to my 2.14 master CD and was able to get wireless working again with the wizard... no fuss, no muss. So, to keep my settings for this machine, I now have a pup-save file on a USB stick... only 128 MB on this particular one , but Puppy doesn't need much to get by. and I am able to reboot and get back online instantly.

I don't know yet why this set-up works and the other does not, but I am going to run with it! It sure is nice to have Puppy now available on a second machine that can go online. I can work on Linux and Puppy on one machine the same time my wife works on her Windows stuff on another.

[jonyo]

Real glad to hear you got connected; pup was my first linux wifi connection. I remember it well & i've certainly run with it

Could be many reasons why earlier versions didn't work for you; the net wiz is constantly being upgraded. Sometimes a newer version comes with new bugs & doesn't.work where earlier versions had.

.I think alot of probs come from a learning curve. It was a steep one for me & still is, so I tend to stick to what I know works. I've just recently had my first clean wifi connection straight from booting up

Be sure to fire up the firewall. Also, to back up your setup, make regular copies of your pup save file. I started over many times, when I messed up, before someone mentioned it to me. & I figured out how easy it was to do. I did try the backup feature on one earlier pup version but I couldn't get it to work..

Once you're sure about being able to save your pup system, that'd be good time to try changes (or new things) with less risk. Never hurts to ask questions first.

[MikeLockmoore]

Like in my previous post about my PC with a WiFi card, by installing Puppy 2.14 on my laptop, I was able to use the wireless networking wizard and get it running with WiFi! Interesting thing, tonight I first tried installing the new 2.15CE release candidate 4. But after booting it, its version of the wireless networking wizard did not get a connection. But that's OK, I like 2.14 just fine.

BTW, getting either Puppy 2.14 or 2.15CE installed on my laptop was not trivial. Unfortunately, this laptop has a broken CDRW drive, so the only easy way to get things into it at this point is by LAN/WiFi (in WinXP) or by USB Flash drive.

Previously, I followed the Lin-n-Win "New-B" instructions for a Puppy 2.13 install, which worked after I tweaked the grub menu.lst file to reference the _second_ partition of my main hard drive, since Dell has placed proprietary system utilities in the first partition. I set up the Puppy 2.14 files in my WinXP "C:" drive in the same way as I did for 2.13, but when I booted it, the initialization process in Puppy 2.14 got lost. I found some forum posts about these types of installations, and noticed some appropriate-looking additional boot parameters that could be passed into the kernel through grub. This seems to put Puppy on the right track to load the main puppy .sfs file from the NTFS partition. BOTTOM LINE: It now boots and automatically connects to my WLAN, so now I can play with Puppy all over my house!

jonyo, I have been fairly careful with my networking setups so far. My WiFi AP / Ethernet router has some firewall features and is configured to require WEP with a long key. I might try WPA in the future. I have used ZoneAlarm on my Windows setups and tested them against the GRC.com service. I don't know as much yet on Linux firewalls, but I get the impression there are a zillion ways to do it, even if there is a standard puppy wizard for it.