Wifi

[jonyo]

I had the same deal but with a netgear ma401ra. Connects Ok to open wifi but not to wep. My understanding is a firmware fix may work & I might try it. http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 2709#92709

Would a USB wifi dongle or adapter work for you?

I have found that when using the atheros pcmcia wifi card driver (orinoco) the wifi in 217.1 or 217 connects only in cases where there is no wep encryption. Once WEP comes into play the wifi card sees the access point but does not connect. When using Ruit in tandem with the connect gui from Puppy's desktop my laptop got into some type of loop and crashed. I also tried an orinoco driver rc13 newly compiled by Tempestuous with the same results. There is yet another newer driver listed as orinocorc15 available but I don't have a means to compile this and don't wish to use up Tempestuous with requests to compile drivers everyday.

I am looking on this forem to find posts of which wifi cards seem to work properly.

Thx,

Vito
PS many thanks to all developers and BarryK for 217.1 - my only linux is Puppy going forward

[DonT]

SirDuncan,

Just as a test, I might offer that you try dropping back to 2.16.1 and run it as a live cd on your dorm hotspot and see what happens. I would be interested to know. Four of us use 2.16.1 right out of the box loading the rt2500, atheros_pci, and zydas modules and at this open hotspot the browser properly redirects to the login page. Works great. We only have the redirection problem with the 2.17.1 version.

Thanks for your post. I was beginning to wonder if others also had a login redirection problem with the 2.17.1 version. I suspected that there was since there were around 700 reads of the thread, but wasn't sure. Thanks again.


jonyo,

Sorry, my fault. After reading through my previous posts, I think I was not altogether clear about the login thing. The hotspot here is open and the login redirection at the hotspot is only to enter an ID to authorize the wifi account. The login is not for WEP or WPA encryption. And, after reading your post I realized that I had not made that clear. Thanks.

Have a good day, both.

DonT

[SirDuncan]

Don,
It could just be bad luck on my part, but 2.16.1 did not work either. The last version I used with the campus redirection (and therefore I know it works) was 2.13. I didn't use 2.14, and by the time 2.15 (which was really just 2.14 with style) came out I was out of school. 2.16 came out during my hiatus, so I missed it.

It aggravates me that I can get an IP and not connect to the internet. If I was at home I could get my old 2.13 CD and use that for wireless, but I will have to wait until I visit home.

Interestingly, I notice that in regular 2.17 it is using the orinoco driver instead of the hostap driver. I doubt it makes a difference, but it is interesting to note.

[DonT]

SirDuncan,

Yes, I know what you mean. It is a little less than thrilling not to get the browser redirection to login after successfully going through the wifi connecting process. And, from my experience, Puppy 2.15 through 2.17 would redirect to a login page. It appears that there is just something different in the 2.17.1 version.

And, interestingly, I just tested 2.20 alpha on the open hotspot here at Books-A-Million and it would not redirect, either. So, whatever has changed in 2.17.1 that caused the problem of redirection is also still in 2.20 alpha.

But, I tested Puppy 2.20 alpha on my WPA wireless account (and using proxy server) at the college today, and it connected and surfed nicely. However, no browser redirection was required for the login. The login for account ID and password is just a small network menu, and not a browser page. And, yes, it is a little frustrating to be able to configure and connect a WPA encrypted account this afternoon, yet not be able to get a browser redirection login on an open hotspot here tonight. Using Puppy 2.16.1 to post this.

All the changes in the new Puppy 3.0 that BarryK has come up with will probably keep Kirk, Dougal, Tempestuous and the other programming heavyweights busy for a while. So, I'm going to do some more Googling on the "long preamble" issue. Don't know if that is what the redirection problem is, but it's the only change that I can see.

Just a suggestion, if you could find out what preamble is required for your campus wireless router, it might help narrow things down a bit. Any of your friends running Windows might be able to use their wireless card configuration utility to possibly see which preamble is configured. And, Network Stumbler (in Windows) has a filtering menu that you can toggle to see if the wifi router has a short or long preamble requirement.

Again, I don't know if that's the problem. I just started at what I could see was different.

And, although I don't know, the orinoco/hostap driver difference you mentioned might be significant. As you know, all it takes sometimes in problem solving is just a clue. This is a good forum, with talented people, and there has to be a solution. After all the browser redirection worked like a charm in the earlier versions.

Thanks for the post.

DonT

[SirDuncan]

I did some experimentation and found that the hostap driver was the reason why 2.17.1 would not get an IP. When I forced 2.17 to use hostap instead the orinoco, it lost the ability to get an IP as well. Still, the orinoco driver won't redirect, thus I am still tethered to the wall.

As far as I can tell, there is no preamble option on my card. That doesn't discount it as a possible culprit, but it means my card can't be configured to us a different preamble than it is using now.

When I was trying to help someone else with a network problem today, I came across a potential work around for our problem. It's a long shot, but I'm going to try. I'll let you know how it goes.

EDIT: Didn't work. Like I said, it was a long shot. Somebody on an Ubuntu forum had a similar problem and fixed it by using a static IP set within the accepted range of the router. Unfortunately, it didn't do me any good.

[DonT]

After reading several threads by tempestuous and rerwin, I installed dhcpcd-1.3.22 pet into Puppy versions 2.17.1, 2.20alpha, and 3.00alpha, and all these versions then redirected the browser to the login page on our hotspot as Puppy 2.16.1 and 2.17 did. Tried 3.00beta3-2.22 and it redirected also. BarryK had put dhcpcd-1.3.22 back into this version.

Ran the same test with dhcpcd-2.0.4 pet, and the browser would not redirect.

Thanks to all who posted about this problem.

DonT