One should not forget to be grateful! This morning my long cable that connects a router to my laptop was, ähm, destroyed. No internet! Just an old USB-Wlan-Stick, that I got as a gift 2 years before in our local linux-group but did not use it. On this laptop are among others XP - and slitaz-cooking. With XP no hope. How could I download the necessary driver for this odd old thing?
Though the kernel 2.6.37 is bad against old nvidia-cards it was great in this respect.
Just plugged in the stick, got recognized in a moment, and one minute later I got WLAN-connected. The only unusual thing:
root@slitaz-cooking-hda8:~# ifconfig
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:A0:C5:56:C4:99
inet addr:192.168.2.21 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:6935 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:7387 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:5563479 (5.3 MiB) TX bytes:978655 (955.7 KiB)
root@slitaz-cooking-hda8:~# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.
dummy0 no wireless extensions.
wlan0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"WLANMB" Nickname:"zd1201"
Mode:Managed Channel:6 Access Point: 00:1A:4F:99:DD:79
Bit Rate:11 Mb/s
Retry RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:xxxxxxxxxx Security mode:open
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0/128 Signal level=34/128 Noise level:0/128
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
I am no technician. For me it seems that the slitaz-cookinng-installation takes the USB-WLAN-thing for an ethernet-card, right? ,,Link encap:Ethernet" doesn't this mean such a thing?
This happened 2 hours after somebody complained about Linux as ,,frickelware", being forced to navigate in the drivers hell, and gave compliments to Apple in this respect: ready to work, no complaints, one mustn't do annything. Well, in case my Apple would have had such a problem - I would not have got my Internet connection. How good something is one can learn with ease: how good or how bad one feels when running into trouble. Sunshine is always nice, with each tool. How one can get out of the fog counts.