How to select between competing drivers in 4.1

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tempestuous
Posts: 5464
Joined: Fri 10 Jun 2005, 05:12
Location: Australia

How to select between competing drivers in 4.1

#1 Post by tempestuous »

The current Puppy 4.1 alphas have a new 2.6.25.x kernel with several upgraded drivers (modules). In some cases the older modules are also included as a fallback, so there's a problem now when a particular hardware device may be claimed by more than one module.
Barry has included a configuation file to deal with this issue; /etc/rc.d/MODULESCONFIG
When you open this file with Geany you will see this line at the end

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PREFLIST=' rt2500usb:rt73usb '
This means that the rt73usb module will be used in preference to the rt2500usb module, since both compete for Ralink RT73 devices.
You can replace these module definitions with your own, or just add additional definitions. Let's say you need the new "b43" module to load for your Broadcom wifi device instead of the old "bcm43xx". The last line should be -

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PREFLIST=' rt2500usb:rt73usb bcm43xx:b43 '
Notice there must be a space before the final apostrophe.
Broadcom owers: be aware that the correct module for your device might alternatively be the new "b43legacy".

Here's another example, where the older "ath_pci" module is found to be better than the new "ath5k" module for Atheros wifi devices, thus -

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PREFLIST=' rt2500usb:rt73usb ath5k:ath_pci '

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prehistoric
Posts: 1744
Joined: Tue 23 Oct 2007, 17:34

peculiar behavior of atmel driver

#2 Post by prehistoric »

Hi tempestuous,

I've had some problems with a PCMCIA wireless card so old I never bothered to post a question concerning 4.1, a "WaveBuddy" by "11Wave". This, I know from other experience, uses the atmel_cs module. By itself, this is not a particularly important problem, but it might illustrate a problem with others. I have had trouble with this on 3.01, 3.02 and 4.00, and even after I get it working I'm not entirely clear how.

My best guess as to how I got it working on this Compaq M700 laptop, (650 MHz PIII M, 384 MB) under everything prior to 4.1, is that loading the atmel_cs module caused it to load the atmel module and exiting network configuration without unloading, then saving and rebooting, caused it to load the correct "firmware" during the next boot. After this, I could find a live network interface. (In one case, the problem was obscured by temporarily using a Linksys USB adapter with a Ralink 2500 chipset. I believe the trick was not configuring the other interface, but leaving the atmel modules loaded before rebooting. I confess I have not exactly reproduced the behavior which led to success. I'm currently using the interface set up this way on 4.0.) On 4.1, no variation of this appears to work.

I have seen a line for atmel commented out in the modules dependencies. Is there something to add to that or modules preferences for this, or is this driver simply known to be broken in 4.1?

As stated above, this problem is not particularly important by itself, (I can substitute a different card) unless it gives some insight into the new wireless configuration in 4.1.

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BarryK
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#3 Post by BarryK »

tempestuous has explained this at the grass-roots level, which is great.
Note that you can also do it from the BootManager GUI in 4.1alpha5, as explained in this web page:

http://puppylinux.com/technical/module-loading.htm

Tempestuous's direct approach is fine if you prefer to edit config files directly, or need to do it from a script.
[url]https://bkhome.org/news/[/url]

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prehistoric
Posts: 1744
Joined: Tue 23 Oct 2007, 17:34

dueling drivers

#4 Post by prehistoric »

Thanks Barry!

Once again the material was out there, just not where I was looking.

There is one distinct advantage to doing this with the GUI, I just realized I was reading preference as precedence, thinking the preferred module came first. I'll switch systems and try again.

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Béèm
Posts: 11763
Joined: Wed 22 Nov 2006, 00:47
Location: Brussels IBM Thinkpad R40, 256MB, 20GB, WiFi ipw2100. Frugal Lin'N'Win

#5 Post by Béèm »

Do I understand well, that there is no zdrv_XXX.sfs file anymore then?
However since Dingo 403 I don't find a zdrv_403.sfs anymore.
Now I have been away for some 8 weeks and I might have missed important messages.
Time savers:
Find packages in a snap and install using Puppy Package Manager (Menu).
[url=http://puppylinux.org/wikka/HomePage]Consult Wikka[/url]
Use peppyy's [url=http://wellminded.com/puppy/pupsearch.html]puppysearch[/url]

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