Hello Sage,Sage wrote:Great news, el ! Whilst we were waiting, I successfully ran PAE002 on a 3.4G mono-core box with amazing results (001 didn't really work on anything in my stable and I don't do multiple core machines). Have just been reporting over on Slacko that the ever-problematic Netgear (prism054g) dongle actually works on C.002 using BK's SNS. This will please a whole bunch of guys who struggle with this Intelsil/Cohiba/Wistron/Prism/Netgear and other aka s. Might I suggest you strike up a contact with 01micko and possibly other developers, including BK, to explain how you achieve this feat that has defied many other distro gurus? Judging by several Fora, there's a lot of folks in possession of this unit.non-PAE ISO
I think the difference between Saluki and Carolina, as far as the dongle is concerned (and I cannot speak to other Puppy's) is the construction of the zdrive module. The Carolina zdrive is hand-created; it is based on Saluki's zdrive, but with modifications.
The main reason carolina-001 was buggy is due to the fact that we hadn't provided the necessary firmware upon the initial release. A terrible oversight on our part. 002 has the firmware on the zdrive. Also, pemasu provided a key file pertaining to the 3.2.13 kernel that was missing at the release of 001. Fortunately, carolina-002 is proving to be much more stable all-around. There were many small fires with 001, but we managed to knock a lot of them down in short order.
I can only take partial credit for the dongle success, as I only acted on Geoffrey's suggestions on the placement of the firmware in order to get it working. Of the two of us, Geoffrey was the only that had access to a dongle for testing purposes.
If you compare the saluki-023 zdrive to the carolina-002-non-pae-light zdrive (apple to apple comparison due to the same kernel being used), you'll see the differences between the two zdrives, particularly concerning the rt2870sta.
As a side note, I did a fix and re-upload of the carolina-002-non-pae-light ISO after I read your post. I built it using the custom-builder, and only later noticed that it had reverted to the stock Saluki style zdrive minus our modifications. If you do choose to compare it with Saluki, you would need to re-download the carolina-002-non-pae-light ISO. A comparison would be easier for you to see what we did differently, as explaining it would be a rather lengthy and dry read.