I am a newbie to the world of Linux.

I have been looking for a Linux distro which would work on an old laptop.

This laptop ran Windows XP Prof for a while until all the security updates bloated the laptop so much it started to really slow down.

I came across Antix and installed it as it would appear that it will run happily with a small amount of ram (196MB).

The install went fine, with no problems, apart from not being able to get the wireless card working.

It would seem that the PCMCIA card services are either not installed or enabled.

Plugging the card in and out does not give any indication that the card has been detected. i.e. no power light is visible on the card, or sounds from the laptop.

The laptop is an old Evesham unit, made by Clevo Co. Model D4J. Product Code D410J. It is a AMD Sempron processor with 196MB ram.

I am trying two PCMCIA wireless cards, but neither are detected.

The first one is a Linksys WPC55AG

The second card is Philips SNN6500/00.

Can anyone give me a step by step list of instructions as to how to get either of these cards to work?

Many thanks

Gary

The cards may be detected but you need to activate the connection. In order to see if the cards are detected, in a terminal, please type:

inxi -F

and please post the output to the list.

To see if you can get wireless going, try going to the control center (should be a link in the menu from fluxbox or icewm), click on Configure Network Interface. This will bring up a terminal and a program to set up your connection. If your card shows up, click on hit and hit enter and follow the instructions to access your network.

I hope this helps. Post back with questions or problems.

Pivera,

Thanks for the tip.

Looks as though the card is not detected.

home/beth# inxi -F
System: Host antiX1 Kernel 2.6.32-1-mepis i686 (32 bit) Distro antiX-M8.5-486 Marek Edelman 11 April 2010
CPU: Single core Mobile AMD Sempron 2600+ (UP) cache 128 KB flags (nx sse sse2) bmips 1603.08 clocked at 800.00 MHz
Graphics: Card VIA K8M800/K8N800/K8N800A [S3 UniChrome Pro] tty res: 80x24 Gfx Data: N/A for root user
Audio: Card VIA VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller driver VIA 82xx Audio at port 1400 BusID: 00:11.5
Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Version 1.0.21
Network: Card Realtek RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ driver 8139too v: 0.9.28 at port 1000 BusID: 00:08.0
Disks: HDD Total Size: 60.0GB (2.7% used) 1: /dev/sda WDC_WD600UE 60.0GB
Partition: ID:/ size: 54G used: 1.6G (4%) fs: ext3 ID:swap-1 size: 2.18GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap
Info: Processes 76 Uptime 19 min Memory 53.6/184.4MB Runlevel 5 Client Shell inxi 1.4.

I have tried to find Configure Network Interface but it does seem to there.

I am using Antix 8.5

Any idea where to go from here to get things working?

Thanks

Gary

I did a quick search and your card might have the atheros chip. You should double check (check manual; google actual card model number). If it's the atheros chip, the following webpage from debian has details on how to istall support for ti


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://wiki.debian.org/ath5k"
linktext was:"http://wiki.debian.org/ath5k"
====================================


If it's not an atheros chip, you could find the appropriate support by looking here


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://wiki.debian.org/WiFi"
linktext was:"http://wiki.debian.org/WiFi"
====================================


I hope this helps.

plvera,

OK. I have now determined that my wireless card is an Atheros AR5006X chip.

I downloaded the second document in the link you gave me and have tried to follow what is written there, but coming up against a problem.

At root I have tried to run 'aptitude' to install the module assistant and wireless tools, but without any success. The message I am getting when trying to run this is aptitude: command not found

I don't where to go from here.

Can you help?

Should aptitude be available in Antix 8.5?

Wait to hear back.

Thanks

Gary

Use apt-get instead of aptitude.

Tried that and that worked, but the next step in instructions is to build and install madwifi-modules.

I typed 'm-a a-i madwifi' and the message displayed in a new window says 'Installation of the madwifi - source source failed.

Ignoring this package. Maybe you ned to add something to sources list, maybe the contrib and non free archives.

Any idea what to do now?

Thanks for your help.

Gary

you should add the sources as the page describes:

#

Add"contrib" and"non-free" components to /etc/apt/sources.list, for example:

# Debian Lenny/5.0
deb
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian"
linktext was:"http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian"
====================================
lenny main contrib non-free

#

Update the list of available packages and install the module-assistant and wireless-tools packages:

aptitude update
aptitude install module-assistant wireless-tools

#

you can either edit the file manually, or use control center to change the /etc/apt/sources.list file. I forget exactly where it is in control center. If you do it manually, open a terminal, change to root and then type geany and open the file.

plvera,

Thanks for the info.

As I am a newbie to the world of linux, a question.

Can I download all these files/packages in one go or do I have to do a copy and past on each individual file?

Bear in mind that I am doing this all through MS Windows, and not linux at the moment.

Thanks for your help.

Gary

Gary,
I'm not sure I understand your question. In terms of installing the files needed for your card, you can do them one at a time, but you should do them using linux using"apt-get install". This way, they are downloaded AND installed. Otherwise you could download the debian packages manually and then install them manually but aside from being more work, you could also run into dependency problems.

I hope this helps.
Pedro

Pedro,

Thanks, but until I can get the PCMCIA wireless card working I cannot connect to the internet at the moment, so downloading the files is only possible for me using my PC at work which is running MS Windows (Vista).

So, I was wondering whether I can download the files in one go, there are a lot of them in individual folders, or do I have to download them individually which is going to take some time.

Is it possible to identify the files I would need so reducing the number of files I would need to download.

Hope this all makes better sense.

Thanks again for the advice. It is appreciated.

Gary

Gary,

Thanks, I get it now. I thought you were connecting via ethernet before.

It's possible for you to find the packages individually here


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages"
linktext was:"http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages"
====================================


and then install them manually (after downloading; they wil, have a .deb extesion), as root, type:

dpkg -i DefFileName

One potential problem, and I hope other people more knowledgeable than I weigh in, is that you are downloading the latest packages (from the recently released version of Debian, now called squeeze), but your antix system is still (probably) running the older version. I'm not sure if you will start to run into problems. Maybe others will have different and better advices.

If you do succeed in installing module-assistant and wireless tool, then you proceed with the instructions about building the needed module for your kernel.

Best of luck!

Pedro

P.S. forgot to add this. If you want to know more about package management using dpkg, either type man dpkg or read here


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dpkg"
linktext was:"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dpkg"
====================================

Thats great Pedro.

I will give it a go and let you know how I get on.

Many thanks for your support.

Gary