SliTaz Forum

raj

Member

Registered: 2016-12-05

Posts: 20

Need PCMCIA Wifi help - pccardctl ident shows no info

I've tried a bunch of things and I can't get wifi working. Basic help would be welcome.

I've got a Satellite 1800 (pentium 3, with a Netgear RangeMax WPN511 pcmcia network card)

First off, how do I get my card recognized? I have the following.

#pccardctl status

Socket 0:

  3.3v 32-bit PC Card

Socket 1:

  no card

#pccardctl ident

Socket 0:

  no product info available

Socket 1:

  no product info available

I know that my card has a atheros AR5212 chip but nothing is showing. 

What steps should I take to get my card working, or is it not possible with my current hardware?

lexeii

Administrator

Registered: 2012-03-21

Posts: 1,853

Re: Need PCMCIA Wifi help - pccardctl ident shows no info

Hi raj,

The problem is your hardware so old so not compatible with the (relatively) new OSes.

I googled your card and found here that you can use Lubuntu 11.04:

It's reported to work with Lubuntu 11.04 out of the box, see the link below.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HardwareSupportComponentsWirelessNetworkCardsNetgear#PCMCIA

PS: WPN511 is the last entry in the PCMCIA table.

On that page we can found that your card needs madwifi driver. Oh, it's so old, even their web site madwifi.org not existed anymore.

Let's search for madwifi package in the SliTaz repository.

Cooking — not present, let's go down,

4.0 — not present, let's go down more,

3.0 — also not present, and

2.0 — present!

So, SliTaz version 2.0 released 16 April 2009 contains Wi-Fi driver for your card. You still can found SliTaz v.2.0 ISO for downloading here:

http://download.tuxfamily.org/slitaz/iso/2.0/

raj

Member

Registered: 2016-12-05

Posts: 20

Re: Need PCMCIA Wifi help - pccardctl ident shows no info

Thanks Aleksej for looking up the related references to my system. I never thought to check ubuntu to get info.  However I'd like to use Slitaz 5.0.  My hardware works out of the box with Tiny Core Linux (actually CorePlus 7.2 the latest) and with Puppy Linux Wary 5.5 (year 2013, I chose Wary because of my video hardware). The latest linux Ath5K driver (which grew out of madwifi) supports my card which is an AR5212 and on their site (http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/ath5k/)  I found that it works with vendor PCI device ID 168c:0013. On my Slitaz 5.0 I see

#lspci -k

other lines...

02:00.0 Class 0200: 168c:0013

I'm wondering if the package firmware-atheros-20141201.tazpkg contains the necessary driver or maybe it is something different, when I installed it nothing happened but I may not have installed other necessary components or not activated something.

I'm also wondering if Slitaz doesn't have the Ath5k driver available could I use an ndiswrapper with my old Windows XP driver. But I'm not sure what I have to do to accomplish this exactly.

The reason I really want to get Slitaz to work is because it has all up-to-date applications for 5.0.

raj

Member

Registered: 2016-12-05

Posts: 20

Re: Need PCMCIA Wifi help - pccardctl ident shows no info

Success. (after searching for "slitaz atheros modules" and found an archived forum post)

Package linux-wireless holds the ath5k driver(and others)

so I installed package linux-crypto (a dependency), and linux-wireless.

Then ran

# sudo modprobe ath5k

Then ran

#lsmod

and

#lspci -k

just to check that the ath5k driver was loaded.

Then ran menu->Preferences->Wi-Fi configuration.

It scanned and found my wireless router.

I configured the network.conf script with it using my wireless router SSID and password.

Then ran

# sudo /etc/init.d/network.sh restart

And I can now browse the internet.

lexeii

Administrator

Registered: 2012-03-21

Posts: 1,853

Re: Need PCMCIA Wifi help - pccardctl ident shows no info

Well done, raj!

Note, packages linux-wireless and linux-crypto are already installed in the ISO. So it fools me, and I thought that ath5k just not worked for your card (I met already ath5k mention for your chipset, as well as the fact that it not required any firmware).

I was wrong, sorry.

Maybe I can build some useful package for you?

raj

Member

Registered: 2016-12-05

Posts: 20

Re: Need PCMCIA Wifi help - pccardctl ident shows no info

As a follow up:

I found that there was something wrong with the slitaz cd that I was using.

I burned a fresh copy of slitaz.rolling.iso albeit a slightly later version and when I booted the system recognized my sound card, my pcmcia ethernet card and installed and loaded the appropriate drivers and the slitaz installer also functioned properly without me doing anything. 

I don't know how I was able to boot to a sort-of functioning system with the bad cd being so bad.