Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[Flash]

Hello all,

I thought I'd try a new wireless PCI card in the hope that it would give me more range than my 2-year-old Netgear WG311 (which works perfectly reliably in Puppy 2.14, just could use more range.)

According to the links in Setecio's post, the Linksys WMP54GS should use the BCM43XX firmware and drivers. I installed the BCM43XX-firmware.pet and Puppy (both 2.14 and 2.15CE) loads the BCM43XX driver, but nothing happens. The "act" LED on the card did light up briefly the first time I loaded the firmware and driver and tried to connect with the wireless wizard, but then went out and hasn't come back on since, no matter what I do.

Does the firmware only have to be loaded once, then is retained in some nonvolatile memory on the wireless card, or does the OS have to be load it into the card at each reboot?

For what it's worth, I couldn't get the thing to work in Windows Me either. Boy, installing the software in Windows is much more complicated and perilous than it is in Puppy.

[Flash]

I exchanged the Linksys for an Airlink 101 AWLH4130. It didn't work either but I'll try it in a different computer.

[tempestuous]

Flash,
Apparently your Airlink 101 uses a new version of the Atheros chipset, which requires the latest MADWiFi driver. Get this driver here -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=111227#111227

[Flash]

Thanks. It worked, but not like I thought it would.

I downloaded the .pet and clicked to install it. Installation seemed to go ok, no problems reported except the missing libproc-3.2.3.so, same as jlm.

It took me several tries to get it to work with multisession 2.15CE. The first try, I installed the .pet then saved the session and rebooted. But when I ran the connection wizard it couldn't find a driver. Time was getting short so I shut the computer down and went to work.

When I came home for lunch, I started the computer and downloaded and installed the .pet again. This time I ran the connection wizard without rebooting, and it found a driver for ath0, which it reported was the ath_pci driver (the old one that it wouldn't load before.)

It seems to work (I haven't figured out yet how to switch from eth0 to ath0, to use the wireless connection to the router instead of the ethernet connection, but blinky shows ath0 and wifi0 as it does for the older Netgear WG311 card in my other computer, and ath0 was given an IP address when I clicked the DHCP button.) Edit: I just discovered that the computer connected to the router thru ath0 when I booted it this evening.

So I don't know what driver was actually loaded. Perhaps the new driver is loaded but is mistakenly called the old ath_pci driver. Or perhaps when it installed, the new driver files replaced the old files, wherever they are kept, but kept the same name. I just don't understand.