Puppy2 wireless drivers README

A dedicated driver is one written specifically for Linux, as opposed to ndiswrapper (and the commercial Linuxant DriverLoader) which "wraps" a Windows driver.

The type of Linux driver for particular wireless adaptors is determined by the chipset contained within.  Documentation provided by the manufacturers is infamous for not containing this information, so a good place to start is the Wirelss Adapter Chipset Directory at http://linux-wless.passys.nl

If this level of investigation sounds like too much effort, just use ndiswrapper and read no further.  ndiswrapper is the uncomplicated solution, you don't even need to know what chipset you have.  And with the "wifi-1.0.4-beta-2.pup" package, ndiswrapper setup is automated.

Dedicated Linux drivers are the optimal solution ... but usually require some effort.


IMPORTANT EXTRA CONFIGURATION INFORMATION:

1) If your wifi driver creates an interface called "eth..." (as opposed to "wlan...", "ath...", "ra..." etc) then be aware that if you have an ethernet LAN adaptor as well, one of your devices will be identified as "eth0" and the other "eth1".

2) For PCMCIA/Cardbus devices, if a network interface fails to be created after loading your wifi driver, it possibly means that your PCMCIA/Cardbus host interface first needs to be "reset".  Some users report these commands as effective -
cardctl eject
cardctl insert

... and some users report this as effective
read PID </var/run/cardmgr.pid
kill $PID
sleep 3
cardmgr

3) In the initial setup stage, it's a good idea to turn off wifi encryption (WEP or WPA) at your router while you get the driver working.  So the basic iwconfig command would then be -
iwconfig wlan0 essid MY_ESSID key off mode managed

If you find that a driver successfully loads, and successfully creates an interface, but then fails (apparently) to associate with an access point when you run the iwconfig command, it might be necessary to add extra parameters to the iwconfig command to control its connectivity characteristics:

3a) "rate", example "iwconfig ... rate 11M"

3b) "channel", example "iwconfig ... channel 8"

3c) Once working without encryption, re-enable encryption at the router and specify your WEP key as hex characters in the iwconfig command -
iwconfig wlan0 essid MY_ESSID key 1234567890 mode managed

NOTE: iwconfig only supports WEP encryption.  For WPA encrytion you will need the wpa_supplicant utility, available separately as a dotpup.

The "key" parameter (to specify WEP encryption key) may require the postfix "restricted" or "open", depending on your router's configuration, example -
iwconfig wlan0 essid MY_ESSID key restricted 1234567890 mode managed
The meaning of this can vary depending on the adaptor, but usually "restricted" means that the adaptor needs to authenticate itself to the router.
"open" is usually the default.

4) It's possible that when first loaded, the driver may automatically put the device into "Master" mode.  In this scenario our command (above) should successfully change the mode to "managed", but will bring down the interface.  The solution is simply to bring the interface up again before running dhcpcd -
ifconfig wlan0 up
(thanks to forum member fudgy for this information)


There is a separately available WPA client encryption utility, wpa_supplicant, which supports -
HostAP
MADWiFi
Prism54
atmelwlandriver
ipw2100/2200

and there is a HostAP daemon, hostapd, to use the host computer as an access point.  hostapd supports -
HostAP
MADWiFi
Prism54

README files for each package contain Puppy-specific information, including configuration.
These same README files can also be found in /root/my-applications/

"connect" scripts are found in /root/my-applications/bin/ containing the necessary commands to configure wireless connections.