Hello and bonjour, Slitaz forum members!
Hello especially to the experts here who kindly come to the aid of confused Linux beginners like myself and endure our boring and foolish questions. (I'm hoping that one of these long-suffering experts, namely Mojo, will reply to this post. Ceel gave me the reference.)
Only yesterday, after much sweaty labor and not a few tears, I succeeded finally in installing a bootable version of Slitaz on a USB stick. My ordeal can be followed on the thread "Yet another tazusb question" (although I really don't think anyone would want to follow it, it just isn't that amusing).
Imagine my chagrin, though, after believing I had escaped at long last from the clutches of Mr. Gates, to find myself obliged to send this post from behind barred Windows because I, like so many before me, am stumped by the Slitaz wireless configuration and have to revert to MS to access this forum. Ce n'est pas rigolo, je vous assure. But I know that Mojo or another good soul will take pity on me and come to my rescue so that this need not continue..
Now, to the facts of the case. I have Slitaz 3.0 on a 1Gb FAT32 partition of a 4Gb usb stick, which I plug into my Asus EeePC1000HA netbook (Intel Atom N270 CPU), which came with an Atheros AR5007EG Wireless Network Adapter.
No hard disk install. Nor do I intend to do one. pendrive=freedom.
Why Slitaz 3? Because Slitaz 4 doesn't come in a hybrid iso (or so I was told by someone in this forum).
Now, just so nobody says "Did you look for an answer in the forum?", I swear I have done my duty and searched for posts that might help me with Slitaz wireless. None was pertinent to my specific situation.
However, I did acquire useful information from them, for example what terminal commands to use - lspci and lsusb - to get the data that folks might need in order to help me, as well as a rundown on what's in the network.conf file (which, in all honesty, I never heard of before in my life <grin>).
I'll print the results below after shutting down, going back to Slitaz, and coming back (Oy!)
But first, here's what I found out while trying to get online in Slitaz at first boot:
-- I was able to get Netbox to list wlan0.
-- Ath5k is auto-detected as "loaded kernel module".
-- Wireless Manager scans and detects all my usual wi-fi signals and lists their properties, like encryption, correctly.
-- Nevertheless, I cannot connect to any of them.
Coupla newbie-type comments:
-- Shouldn't Slitaz be loading wlan0 and scanning during the boot? (I think I saw that as part of the boot process.)
-- I don't believe that Netbox (or whatever) is applying DHCP to wlan0. This is just a gut feeling and probably should be ignored <grin>.
I'll go do lspci and lsusb and make a copy of network.conf, and be right back. . .
. . . I'm back. Ran lspci in the terminal (where else, right?) with that cool ">" redirection to a file "lspci.txt" (learned this from reading forum posts), which I then copied to my desktop in sda1 (more about this below). The only relevant data I could see was:
01:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5001 Wireless Network Adapter [168c:001c] (rev 01)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Attansic Technology Corp. Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 PCI-E Ethernet Controller [1969:1026] (rev b0)
No lsusb data. Probably because no usbutils (?). Lack of this data provoked the appearance of a dialogue window that offered to look for usbutils (or whatever it's called). That in turn brought up the Tazhw window, which said it was searching. Well, it kept on searching. And searching. It never caught on to the fact that I didn't have an Internet connection, so it hung. (Has someone fixed this bug in Slitaz 4?)
I started to get a little huffy after about fifteen minutes of Tazhw searching pointlessly, so I brought up a terminal and wrote the first thing that came to mind, which I think was "su, root, kill Tazhw". That scared it away, by golly!
Here's network.conf:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# /etc/network.conf: SliTaz system wide networking configuration.
# Config file used by: /etc/init.d/network.sh
#
# Set default interface.
INTERFACE="eth0"
# Dynamic IP address.
# Enable/disable DHCP client at boot time.
DHCP="yes"
# Static IP address.
# Enable/disable static IP at boot time.
STATIC="no"
# Set IP address and netmask for a static IP.
IP="192.168.0.6"
NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
# Set route gateway for a static IP.
GATEWAY="192.168.0.1"
# Set DNS server for a static IP.
DNS_SERVER="192.168.0.1"
# Wifi connection.
# Enable/disable wireless connection at boot time.
WIFI="no"
# Wifi interface (iwconfig) and ESSID.
WIFI_INTERFACE="wlan0"
WIFI_ESSID="any"
WIFI_MODE="managed"
WIFI_KEY=""
WIFI_KEY_TYPE="none"
WPA_DRIVER=""
WIFI_CHANNEL=""
WIFI_IWCONFIG_ARGS=""
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That's all the data I was able to collect. However, I feel obliged to mention a few irritating bugs that came my way (besides Tazhw searching for a package without an Internet connection, as mentioned above). I realize that I am using Slitaz 3 and not the latest version, but I'll mention them anyway as they are not inconsequential:
1) "Find Files" in PCman does not work. It returned nothing for File Name "network.conf" in Places to Search "/etc", which is where I found it. (Yes, I know that "cat /etc/network.conf" would probably have caught the file.)
2) The buttons at the bottom of the Mountbox dialogue window do not work properly. Only the dialogue window you get when you double-click on a device listed in Mountbox provides a working mount-unmount dialogue. (see below).
3) Although the c: partition on my hard disk drive (sda1) is mounted, apparently as part of the boot process, I am unable to access my Windows desktop (c:\Documents and Settings\Mike\Desktop). Using PCman I can get to that directory, but there is nothing in it, whereas it is actually where all my important files are kept. All other sub-directories in sda1 are accessible. Not Desktop.
I wanted to copy the file I made in Slitaz of lspci, as well as network.conf, to my Desktop in c: so that I could print them here, and this bug was a problem for me. I was fortunately able to solve it by unmounting sda1 and re-mounting it in /home/tux instead of /media/disk. Then I had access to Desktop in c:. I further experimented by unmounting it again (after copying the files over), and re-mounting it in /media again after recreating a /disk directory there. That worked, too.
This is all very problematic and I hope it has been fixed in Slitaz 4. If I can't acccess my important files on sda1 I am in trouble. There's no time to unmount and remount every time I need a file there. Nor to attempt to work with them in a terminal.
One last comment about this: Should any partitions of the hard disk be mounted by default? Isn't that rather unusual? I suppose it was put into the boot process with the idea of being user-friendly, but it may not be such a good idea, do you think? It certainly made a lot of trouble for me.
Enough said about bugs in Slitaz 3. Veux pas qu'on se fâche avec moi.
I hope that Mojo or someone else will help me straighten out my wireless problem. I want to get online in Slitaz ASAP.
Maybe the best thing for me to do is make a new usb installation, this time of Slitaz 4?
Cheers!
Mike
