(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I was given this thingy which works well with following instructions to install it on WinXP on a Toshiba Satellite 1800 (900MHz laptop).

Trying with 4.21, 4.31, 2.14X, it appears no available drivers with those puppies. Also not with 2.02 Retro either.

The magic WL-311FA appears to also not show up on a forum search so maybe nobody has written about it.

Suggestion is made (in the "connect" wizards) to use NDISwrapper, but I never have tried, and am insufficiently confident.

Any ideas? It would be nice to get it working on an even more ancient Satellite 2400 with my MiFi gadget which currently works on up to 3 laptops simultaneously (we don't have more than 3).

Richard

Does this help?
Try this link.
It is to a Ubuntu forum page on your wifi card.

EDIT
hostap_cs driver, modified to recognise the SparkLAN WL-311FA, device ID 16af:0002
for the 2.6.30.5 kernel in Puppy 4.3.x
appears to be unsuccessful.

richard.a is the only forum member to ever report anything about this wifi device, yet bizarrely, there were 8 downloads of this driver within 24 hours of it being posted.

Attachment now removed to avoid further newbie bizarre behaviour.

Thankyou to both of you. Will get back when I have a moment.

In the meantime I've picked up another oldie wireless PCMCIA dongle, and I find that the newer T1800 (with the same 4.21 and 4.31 as on the older T2140) will recognise the new wifi dongle, so am wondering if the problem is compounded by the T2140 having pre- Cardbus sockets.

I experienced this under Windows95 years ago with a C-Net cardbus ethernet PCMCIA adaptor.

This is proving to be an useful exercise on compatibility. Neither PCMCIA dongles seem to be recognised by version 2 and 3 systems, but will give a detailed report in a day or two.

Again, thanks to both of you.

Richard

8-bit wrote:Does this help?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=250124
http://www.linux-wlan.org/

Yes, the linux-wlan-ng drivers do support the Prism2/2.5/3 chipsets, in parallel with the hostap drivers.
But the hostap drivers are far more sophisticated, supporting WPA encryption for example, and the linux-wlan-ng drivers are no longer supported in modern kernels, except for the USB variants which appear in the "staging" section of the official kernel source.

Bottom line: Prism2-based Cardbus/PCI wifi devices are only supported under modern kernels by the hostap drivers.

richard.a wrote:am wondering if the problem is compounded by the T2140 having pre- Cardbus sockets.

A Google search reveals that the Satellite 2140CDS has a 32bit Cardbus device (not 16bit PCMCIA)
so there should be no compatibility problems there ...
unless your 2140's bios has been set for "legacy 16bit PCMCIA" mode?

Google also indicates that a few people have problems with the 2140 Cardbus interface under Linux. The solution is not obvious, but I suspect it will be related to hardware resource allocation.
Again, bios is a good place to troubleshooting ... try disabling the serial ports ... or perhaps any internal modem, and you may find your Cardbus interface will spring to life.

tempestuous thank you.


WLAN - Prism2/2.5/3 chipsets
I have the 1800 on at the moment and have installed the dotpet on 4.31 and the 4.21, and it didn't do anything. I did a cold reboot between installing the dotpet and trying to use the device. The LED on the dongle did not light either

I tried reloading both the hostap and the prism modules, to no avail, in all of the 3 systems installed, all to no avail. Nothing was recognised. Compare with the Linksys dongle discussed below.

Re the BIOS - problem with Toshibas is their very proprietory BIOS has very little you can change.

However I did go and look and found that under PC Card Controller Mode it said Auto-Selected, and this wasn't a choice that could be modified (it seems). That was on page 2. On page 1 there was USB Legacy Emulation which was set to Enabled.

Something I have noticed is that a PCMCIA USB 3-port hub I have does not work on the PC card slots on either machine.



LinkSys Wireless-G WPC54G V3
I got this to run nicely, but was interested to note 4.21 and 2.14X15 both described it as being :
Wireless bcm43xx Broadcom AirForce One 54g

The 431 described it as just Wireless b43

4.31 and 2.14 work well, and 4.21 I notice is a retro kernel version, chosen because I couldn't get Grub to install from the latest version.

Interestingly it insisted it was on eth1 and when I went to check the wireless configuration there was an extra line in the wizard saying "eth1 is actually wireless, so follow this procedure" - or something like that. Wierd



D-Link AirPlus G DWL-G630
4.31 says its an Atheros Communications AR5005G (ath5k) and works nicely
4.21 says its an Atheros Communications AR5005G (ath_pci) and works nicely
2.14X says its an Atheros Communications (unknown device) and works nicely



I'll revisit this post with the Satellite 2140, and make further comments which may possibly help someone else


Thanks again tempestuous

Richard
Adelaide

Your observations regarding the varied Linux drivers for LinkSys WPC54Gv3 and D-Link DWL-G630 relate to the difference between newer kernels and older kernels.
For wifi devices with Broadcom chipsets, the old driver was bcm43xx, the new driver b43.
For wifi devices with Atheros chipsets, the old driver was ath_pci (from the MADWiFi project), the new driver ath5k.

There's nothing strange about a wifi network interface being called "ethxx". This is simply the naming convention adopted by the wifi driver developers. Ralink proprietary wifi drivers create network interfaces identified as "raxx", for example.

richard.a wrote:I have the 1800 on at the moment and have installed the dotpet on 4.31 and the 4.21

Well testing under Puppy 4.21 is pointless; I compiled the modified hostap_cs driver for the 2.6.30.5 kernel in Puppy 4.3.x (not 4.3-retro).

richard.a wrote:I tried reloading both the hostap and the prism modules

The only compatible "hostap" module is hostap_cs.
The "prism" module you refer to is probably prism54, which is totally incompatible.

Clearly the modified driver will not bring the SparkLAN WL-311FA card to life ...
although it would have been interesting to see what was reported about how this driver loaded if you were to run the "dmesg" command.
So I have removed the driver attachment.
This wifi device appears to be unsupported in Linux, also it's limited to B-mode speeds, and doesn't support WPA wifi encryption.
I suggest you throw it in the bin.

Thanks for explaining that. There are some things I'm fairly competent with. This isn't one, lol!

I'll give it back to the fellow who gave it to me

Richard