Wireless Wolvix, without ease.

[vakkotaur]

Perserverance or cussed stubbornness?

I wasn't sure how at first, but I got a wireless connection on Wolvix... and lost XFCE response. I could stuff in a virtual terminal, even look at the web with lynx.

I was getting suspicious of the CDs I burned, from different downloads, as they didn't seem to act quite the same on the laptop... yet both worked fine on the desktop. Laptop problems? I let memtest run for 10+ hours and it reported no errors.

I rebooted into Wolvix and XFCE only almost came up. It stalled, showing me the launch bar but not putting any icons on it. I also didn't have a right-button menu. After waiting several minutes, I bailed out with CONTROL-ALT-BACKSPACE and tried to start things up again with startx. 'Waiting for X server to accept connections.. .. .. .. ..'

As I'd seen XFCE on Wolvix act weird before, I was wondering if this was a new version that wanted more machine than I had. Yet CPU usage was low. I removed the Aironet wireless card and brought Wolvix up again and started XFCE and let it run. After an hour or two, it was still running fine, even after I stressed things a bit by starting GIMP -- though with the one memory usage setting I could easily change knocked down considerably.

Now I got curious and put in the Aironet card, hot-plugging it. The system recognized it, but WiFi Radar didn't work. But I could get a connection by doing a few things in a terminal window. Even more curious, I shut the laptop down and rebooted with the Aironet card in place. XFCE seemed to behave. I could get a connection manually. WiFi Radar could break the connection, but not re-connect. But I could manually reconnect after some fiddling around. This is repeatable. WiFi Radar does have a configuration file /etc/wifi-radar/wifi-radar.conf that needs to be edited. wlan0 is the default it uses and in my case there is no wlan0, just eth0 and wifi0 -- and while one would think wifi0 would be the right choice, it's eth0.

Something seems to be preventing iwconfig from doing its job when I use it change settings. I have to take an extra step or steps to get past that screwiness.

The incantation:
1. Edit /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf to comment out the first active section. Optionally edit the 'example' for the card to have the right settings or as many as can be made easily.
2. Run /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 and watch it fail.
3. Use iwconfig to set remaining settings (e.g. iwconfig eth0 key s:password - where the password can be typed as plaintext rather than hexadecimal). If the settings don't take, repeat step 2. Hopefully this is not an infinite loop.
4. Run /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 again - and get a connection.

When it works, it works fast. The first time it connected I was surprised that I wasn't waiting through all the retries. I've had the laptop running overnight and XFCE is still behaving and wireless is still working.

I suspect that WiFi Radar would work if it didn't trigger whatever blocks iwconfig from doing its job. I'm not quite ready to install to the hard drive. I want to see WiFi Radar work first. And evidently I'm not the only one who hasn't seen WiFi Radar work.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I have seen complaints about iwconfig before. That may be the culprit. My first suspicion would be that the iwconfig command is a version 0.x thingie that doesn't yet understand everything it needs to know. Tested with only one or two particular wireless devices and drivers, it makes assumptions that aren't always true. This is a common open source fault, one that can often be laid at the feet of the hardware vendors who don't give adequate support to Linux/UNIX and are secretive about details, or at the feet of whoever wrote the driver, because they invented their own standards along the way.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Well, that was a "D'oh!" moment. ifconfig eth0 up and iwconfig works as advertised. It's a bit strange to me that eth0 wasn't up from a boot in which the card in place. Many have run into the iwconfig not working for them... and I finally found a thread somewhere with a reply that mentioned getting it to work, and how.

Curiously, the Aironet card (made by Cisco) has linux drivers and tools developed by Cisco and a separate linux driver developed independently. I've seen recommendations for both.

I think I found some of the XFCE weirdness. When I let Wolvix just boot and go, I seem to have problems with X/XCFE. When I keep it from starting right off and tell it 'nodma' things seem to work. I recall setting 'nodma' in Ultima, though that was just to speed booting a bit.