The page I found so helpful was
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/wikka/WiFi
My laptop is a Toshiba 6100 Satellite Pro. It has a Toshiba wireless mini-PCI card which Windows telss me is located on CardBus 0. It's built in and not plugged in as a PCMCIA card or USB (I can't get Puppy to see my USB WLAN stick yet, but that's another issue...)
The chipset is Orinoco.
As I suspect there will be other readers who are almost as clueless about Linux as I am, I'll make this very verbose - apologies to all you Linux experts.
1. Open an RXVT window and type
iwconfig
This identified 3 devices lo, eth0 (the built-in LAN NIC on my motherboard) and eth1, which was obviously the wireless card becuase it reported lots of data about frequency, protocol etc.
2. customise the wireless configuration. WiKi suggests:
iwconfig eth1 channel 7 essid pupppplaypen mode managed key s:puppy
I had to issue each of these commands separately (e.g. iwconfig eth1 essid XXXXXXXXX) until I figured that the card did not want to accept a channel number. I don't know why - it kept telling me that it did not want to have its frequency set. My AccessPoint is set to channel 1, so I left that parameter out, hoping the laptop WLAN card would default to channel 1.
The essid goes in without quotes. For the key I tried putting in the passphrase - although this is accepted, the hexadecimal string that resulted was wrong (you can see what has been set by typing iwconfig again, without params).
So I put the key in myself in hex. I did not use any kind of prefix, just typed it in in groups of 4 digits separated by hyphens:
iwconfig eth1 key 12a3-43b7-12...etc
3. Once you are connected to the wireless network, you need to set the IP address (ignoring the use of DHCP for the time being) with a command looking like:
ifconfig wlan0 192.168.1.41 netmask 255.255.255.0
The above assumes that your local net has an address range of 192.168.1.xxx - commonly the case.
You do need to know an IP address which is likely to work - I knew that 192.168.0.4 would work and was available (I looked on the DHCP table of my router by accessing it from a wired machine).
4. Now for a route command to tell Puppy the way to other kennels:
route add -net default gw 192.168.1.254 netmask 0.0.0.0
The gateway (gw) is the router gateway on your managed network.
...and you need to know this Ip address too before you start. At this point I knew things were working because although I couldn't get the Internet through Mozilla, I could ping my router successfully.
5. Now open ROX and find /etc/resolv.conf; use Open as Text
Enter the DNS name server addresses given by your ISP, e.g.
nameserver 202.63.39.130
nameserver 202.63.43.130
Save the file and exit ROX.
I couldn't find this info on my router, or on my ISP's website, so I just used the one given here, on the basis that whoever wrote the Wiki probably used a real DNS address and it worked.
6. Test that the connection works via Ping, e.g.
ping
www.google.com
Great joy as ping returns - pause to marvel at Puppy's great excellence.
7. Go to Puppy menu and call up Network configuration wizard so that eth1 can get properly set up by DHCP.
8. Announce succesful link to world by writing triumphant message on Puppy forum!
