Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

tempestuous · Joined: 10 Jun 2005 Posts: 4944 Location: Australia

Oops. Yes, all revised dotpups were corrupt. Fixed now.

displacedtexan · Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 3

New puppy user... I was looking for a Linux distro that was lightning fast to boot up and shut down and I think I have found it with Puppy!

Now my probably... trying to install my Laptop's wireless card from:
http://www.dotpups.de/dotpups/Wifi/wireless-drivers/

is it just me, or is the ipw394*.pup file missing from the above link? I see ipw3945_README.txt but not the .pup

thanks...

Jason

smog · Joined: 13 Jun 2006 Posts: 134

Nevermore,

Don't give up, I couldn't get my internal wireless to work, despite trying very hard!! so I bought a netgear pcmcia card. BUT, thanks to tempestuous' help, within 2 days of buying the pcmcia card, I did get the internal wireless card working.

Are you usng WEP? If so, are you sure you have set it up properly?

I found that setting the WEP key as iwconfig "key restricted MYWEPKEY" i.e. not just "key MYWEPKEY" solved my problem.

Also I spent a long time setting up iwconfig on wlan0 but it turned out I should have been using eth1.

Hope you get it working.

MU · Posted: Thu 06 Jul 2006, 09:59 Post subject:

pakt · Joined: 04 Jun 2005 Posts: 1089 Location: Sweden

I have repeated my tests of the bcm43xx-softmac.pup in Puppy 2.01. The results are different from what I reported to tempestuous in a PM, but, unfortunately, the dotpup still doesn't work. Using ndiswrapper does work well though.

This is a summary of printouts during testing.
The Dell Inspiron 510m laptop uses the Broadcom BCM94306 chip (802.11b/g). It has built-in 10/100 cable ethernet which was disconnected during testing.

# modprobe bcm43xx

dmesg shows:

MU · Posted: Sat 08 Jul 2006, 09:53 Post subject:

PM from tempestous::

tempestuous · Joined: 10 Jun 2005 Posts: 4944 Location: Australia

Thanks Mark.

Paul, the bcm43xx driver looks like it's close to success. Troubleshooting:
Load all modules that bcm43xx depends on first -

modprobe ieee80211_crypt
modprobe ieee80211
modprobe ieee80211softmac
modpobe firmware_class
modprobe bcm43xx

After "modprobe bcm43xx" you must bring up the interface before doing anything else -
ifconfig eth1 up
This is helpful for most wifi drivers, but CRUCIAL for this driver.

I see this - "Invalid Bit Rate=1 Mb/s" so be a bit more explicit with your iwconfig command -
iwconfig eth1 essid MyAP rate 11M mode managed
You could also specify the channel in this command.

And now do "ifconfig eth1 up" again just to be sure, before running dhcpcd.

If still no success, please report any relevant dmesg output, especially stuff relating to "SoftMAC".

And one little thing to check - your access point must broadcast its SSID. Hidden SSID's won't work with this driver.

pakt · Joined: 04 Jun 2005 Posts: 1089 Location: Sweden

EDIT: I've trying to post this since last weekend but kept getting a "URL not found" error from the forum. I finally discovered it was this text: '<jketreno@linux.intel.com>' that was part of the quote below that caused the problem. Once I removed it, I had no problem posting Confused

Thanks, tempestuous, for your patience. I've now got the interface working using your dotpup Smile

After a bit of experimenting, the key commands seem to be 'ifconfig eth1 up' and specifying the right combination of 'iwconfig' parameters. To get the interface to work, I managed to minimize the commands to:

tempestuous · Joined: 10 Jun 2005 Posts: 4944 Location: Australia

Well done Paul. I'm pleased that the bcm43xx driver works, it was quite difficult to compile, since the source code was available only as a (large) kernel source patch. Apparently the latest kernels include this driver as a standard module, along with the latest softmac wifi stack.
I will update the README to reflect your results. The fact that you needed to force the bitrate and channel parameters appears to be characteristic of a driver in its early stages of development. The process of forcing the bitrate to 11M also appears to be helpful with Linux wifi drivers that are failing to connect to some modern 54Mbs and 108Mbs routers.
I now wonder if this solution would also make the rt2x00 (Ralink new code) driver achieve better success?

tempestuous · Joined: 10 Jun 2005 Posts: 4944 Location: Australia

Update July 2006: Atmel-based USB wifi adaptors are now supported in Puppy2.
The BerliOS Atmel at76c503a wifi driver package will now compile under Puppy2's kernel, thanks to some recent development of this driver for the first time in 2 1/2 years. I have just added it to the collection of wifi dotpups.

BlackAdder · Joined: 22 May 2005 Posts: 382

Thanks for the Atmel drivers, tempestuous. I have access to a Netcomm NP7042 (03eb:7605) and a Micronet SP907BB V2 (12fd:1001). Both work well with these Puppy 2 drivers.
The at76c503-connect script could benefit from a sleep after the modprobe - I found 5 seconds was needed. The device connects and downloads the firmware, then disconnects and reconnects - don't know why, but that is what dmesg shows, and all that fluffing around takes some time.

tempestuous, you should get another Goodonyer award. If they were medals, you would look like a Russian general.

tempestuous · Joined: 10 Jun 2005 Posts: 4944 Location: Australia

With the release of Puppy 2.02, these drivers are no longer useful.
But the contents of these driver packages can be helpful in creating your own updated driver. The main modules must, of course, be recompiled from source, but the original dotpups often contain additional utilities (hotplug, for example) plus firmware files, configuration files, and the all-important README which can be the most useful resource of all.
To extract the contents of a dotpup first do this - "unzip MYWIFIDRIVER.pup"
The unzipped dotpup will contain "FILESYSTEM.tgz". Uncompress this as such - "tar -zxvf FILESYSTEM.tgz"
Now you will have the full contents of the dotpup. All kernel-specific modules are in /lib/modules/xxx. All OTHER files are useful.

The wpa_supplicant, aircrack, kismet, and HostAP daemon dotpups remain useful, since these utilities don't contain kernel-specific modules.

Rickrandom · Joined: 21 Jan 2006 Posts: 195 Location: Bedfordshire, UK

Excuse my ignorance, but I thought these drivers were for kernel 2.6.16.7, and I thought from Barry's news page that Puppy2.02 was still at this kernel version.

In very simple terms, why do they no longer work?

I did as suggested, and read the readme, but it was way over my head.

I was pretty pleased with myself (I'm easily pleased) when I got my Atheros mini-PCI card working in 2.01 with the madwifi driver. I was equally pleased with NTFS read/write in 2.02. I guess with the rapid evolution of Puppy, it's very difficult to have the best of all worlds immediately....

tempestuous · Joined: 10 Jun 2005 Posts: 4944 Location: Australia

At http://www.puppyos.net/news/
under the heading Puppy 2.02beta, with full NTFS write support, Thursday, July 27, 2006, 04:03 AM

violetdream · Joined: 15 Apr 2006 Posts: 109

Have new driver packages been compiled for pup202? I'm dying without my madwifi Sad

If anyone could package a new version that would be fantastic!