(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hello
I've been trying to get my Belkin wireless card setup in Puppy Barebones 2.01r2. Funny thing is, the card isn't even recognized as being inserted, whereas in 2.4.x (another distro) it was detected as Ralink, but was unsupported. Is there anything I can update in Barebones to get the card recognized?

Thanks for any and all help!

MDG

Get ralink-legacy.pup and ralink-legacy_README.txt from
http://puppyfiles.org/dotpupsde/dotpups ... -and-2.01/

Thanks for your reply, Tempestuous. Actually, I did already download and installed (or tried to) the ralink-legacy driver and read the readme text. Since the card is not even recognized as being present, I'm inclined to think PCMCIA support is missing as with 2.4.x kernal in another distro the lights on the card flashed on boot and when inserted after booting, but I could not figure out how to build the driver as the old laptop I am using is limited on RAM, so I thought I might have better luck with puppy. I had heard the 2.6.x kernal would better support RT2500 driver, but being limited to 64 MB ram makes the going tough no matter what distro I try. I do have a 128 MB swap partition. I don't think this old laptop could handle Puppy 2.13 or 2.14. So close and yet so very, very far away....
Thanks again for your reply.

MDG

Did you get it running? I'm using Puppy Linux 2.13 with my old Compaq laptop and a Sweex (Ralink RT2500) PCMCIA card to write this reply.

It's not easy and intuitive though.

- You first need to load the rt2500 driver either through the command line (insmod rt2500) or with the Puppy Network Wizard
- on the command line (Console) type: 'ifconfig ra0 up' to activate the card
- then go to Network->RUtilt and scan for your network and then do 'Add to profile' Enter the encryption settings (key, encryption type). Also make sure that you select the correct Authentication (open or shared) since the scan sometimes reports the authentication as Open even though you need Shared to get it to work
- in the IP Settings tab, select DHCP
- save the profile and do a 'Apply', it should now connect to the network

Thanks for the reply BigPilot!
I was able to download Puppu 2.14. Upon bootup, which took a while with such an old laptop, I'm still not shown that the card is even identified as being inserted in the laptop. This must be an IRQ problem?? I have no idea how to trouble what this might be. Perhaps I should try nodhcp?? All I know is a different 2.4.x distro the card was identified as being inserted and that it was a RAlink card, but I just could not get the driver compiled for it. ARRRGGGG!!!!

Anyone had this sort of problem before?

Thanks for everyone's great help!

MDG