I'm part of a group working on a project. We have an old laptop that was very, very sluggish with Windows XP (500 MHz, 256 MB of RAM, originally equipped with Windoze 98) but runs great with antiX Linux. (Thanks, anticapitalista and everyone else at antiX Linux!)

We have a WPC54GS v1.1 wireless card that worked in version M8.2 but doesn't work in version M8.5. I had to revert back to version M8.2 to get the wireless card working again.

What changed between these two versions of antiX Linux? I thought that hardware support normally increases in later kernels and later versions. Why would this piece of hardware be supported in an older version but not a newer version? Is this related to the Linux kernel, Debian, MEPIS, or antiX? I've never delved into what it takes to support a particular item of hardware. Is it common for Linux kernels to drop support of certain drivers on the grounds that the items in question are old and hardly used by anyone anymore?

jhsu wrote:Is it common for Linux kernels to drop support of certain drivers on the grounds that the items in question are old and hardly used by anyone anymore?

I think so.
But then that doesn't mean you can't make it work. Like you may use ndiswrapper and the Windows driver or even install with smxi an older kernel and try if it works.

How do I figure out what part of antiX Linux M8.2 supports that particular wireless card? How do I determine if it's the kernel, Debian, MEPIS, or antiX Linux? Perhaps there is a package in the repository that supports this wireless card.

First of all I don't have wireless.
I found
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which shows that people have once (a few years ago) run the Windows driver with ndiswrapper but also that it depends on the precise chipset you have. Also if you got it working with 8.2 out of the box that probably means that the kernel came with its driver and now it doesn't (I think that some drivers come with the kernel and others are compiled with it as modules and that these latter ones are chosen by the person who builds the specific kernel).
I really don't understand much of that but if you still have the 8.2 live-cd you can boot it and run 'inxi -F' or 'inxi -Nx' and it will output the driver that's in use for it then maybe there's a way to load it for 8.5's kernel too. (all these thoughts are hoping that someone with a more precise knowledge on this may come to help)
If you have 8.5 already installed then you could try the kernel installation option in smxi and see if there's an 2.6.27 option, which was the branch from antiX 8.2's kernel.

jhsu,
try inxi -F in a terminal to see if the system is recognizing the card. I'm having problems also in a very old laptop with wireless using a broadcom b43 chip. I haven't had the time to fix this yet.

Once you figure out the card chip then google should tell you if other people are having problems with your particular card and the kernel, and they might offer some solutions on how to fix it (for example using ndiswrapper; in previous versions of antix there was a Mepis network assistant that was very good in setting up old cards with ndiswrapper).

You could also try loading a liquorix or a debian kernel and you might get lucky, since they package different modules.

good luck!

P.S. I found this old thread in Mepis where I was discussing my wireless problems. It shows all the things that were suggested and how I finally fixed it (last post). If you don't have this particular chip then most of the information is useles, yet it shows all the"fun" things that can be done to get the wireless driver built, loaded, recognized, etc. __{{emoticon}}__


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I believe it should work following the same process described at antix-8-5-wireless-help-t2569.html