Recently in Wireless Category

I've been thinking about wired vs. wireless networking over the past few days as I plan a new home network in my mind.

And I remembered a device that just might solve a problem you're having.

What if you have a laptop or desktop computer that, for whatever reason, either can't or won't play nice with wireless? Either you can't get a wireless card (PCI or PCMCIA/CardBus) to work with your box, or your OS (even Windows balks at some cards) won't recognize and configure it.

So what do you do? Here are a couple of devices I've never seen offered anywhere else. They're called Wireless Ethernet Adapters, and a company called MacWireless sells them.

The way they work is that you plug an Etnernet cable into the adapter and your PC — and I imagine that this device works with Macs, as well as PCs under Windows, Linux, or any BSD. Anything that uses wired Ethernet can seemingly go wireless with this device. Even an old Sparcstation ...

There are two models available, the MacWireless 11g Ethernet Adapter with 32 milliwatts of power for $99.98 (above right) and the High Power 11g Ethernet Adapter with 400 milliwatts of power for $189.98 (left).

You manage the device with a Web browser (see the PDF instructions for the 11g adapter and the high-power 11g adapter.)

Both of these boxes are expensive. If you can use a $20 Wi-Fi card with your laptop or desktop, that's probably the way to go. But if you have an older computer that just doesn't want to work with Wi-Fi, this is a very legitimate way to bring wireless networking to your Ethernet-equipped computer.

I've known about MacWireless for quite some time. I discovered the company way back in my early This Old Mac days when I was trying to make a Macintosh Powerbook 1400 work in the modern world (under System 7 no less). There are a few helpful Web sites out there on how to modify, expand and generally use older Apple hardware. This one from Penmachine.com led me to the Orinoco WaveLAN PCMCIA card that has been so very helpful to me with just about every laptop I've owned then and since (Linux and all the BSDs LOVE this card). It also pointed me to MacWireless, which is where I discovered these interesting Wi-Fi-to-Ethernet devices.

As far as technological solutions go, this is an idea that you'd think companies like Netgear and D-Link would've picked up on. But thus far, these units from MacWireless are the only things I know of that do what they do.

MacWireless has quite a few other interesting products, including full setups for Wi-Fi routers that can live outdoors and get what's called Power Over Ethernet, meaning they don't need 120-volt electricity to work. They also offer many Wi-Fi adapters for Macintoshes from the G3 and G4 era. This one looks like a good fit for my G4. I wonder if it works with Linux and OpenBSD ...

Since I shocked it back to life, the $15 Laptop (1999 Compaq 7770dmt with 233 MHz Pentium II MMX CPU, 144 MB RAM and 3 GB hard drive) has relied on an Orinoco WaveLAN Silver 802.11b wireless PCMCIA card for networking.

The WaveLAN is truly a wonder, working in both my 1996 Apple Macintosh Powerbook 1400, plus just about every damn thing made thereafter, and it has served me quite well in the years since I fought and scratched for it on eBay.

But I don't really have a lot of wireless networking in my life. My Netgear router used to pump out 802.11b, but the radio died about a year ago, and the router is now wired-only, where it continues to work wonderfully.

And at the Daily News offices, no WiFi penetrates the hallowed halls of Editorial, where all I have at my disposal is wired Ethernet.

The wide-open WiFi signals I sometimes "borrow" from my neighbors are weak at best and usually don't work. The best WiFi I've tried is at the Los Angeles Public Library's many branches, but I don't have time to linger.

And the now-free WiFi for Starbucks cardholders works great with the Compaq in Linux but not at all on OpenBSD (I know this because OpenBSD wireless on this very laptop does work at the library).

So I've been contemplating purchase of a PCMCIA/Cardbus Ethernet card for some time. They're cheap. But do they work on my ancient hardware and many and varied operating systems?

I picked up a TRENDnet TE100-PCBUSR 10/100Mbps 32-Bit CardBus Fast Ethernet Card last week and finally got a chance to remove the Orinoco WaveLAN card, insert the TRENDNet and give it a try.

It works!

The TRENDnet uses a tried, true and otherwise compatible Realtek chipset with the 8139too Linux driver.

I had no trouble loading the driver and configuring the card in Puppy Linux 2.13 (where I had to select the driver on my own) and Puppy 4.00 (where the system detected the card and correctly chose the driver for me).

So for the first time in the year or so that I've had the Compaq Armada 7770dmt, I have reliable networking for the aging but still sturdy laptop at both home and work.

The next thing I'm going to try is seeing if the laptop can physically accommodate the TRENDnet wired and Orinoco wireless cards at the same time, and if I can in turn configure both to work without having to pull one and plug in the other.

$15 Laptop note: The eight-part series on finding the right OS for the $1Compaq Armada 7770dmt is ready to run. All I need to do is get the entries into Movable Type and queue them up to run. I hope to do that in the next few days.

Even though I found very specific instructions for making the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 USB wireless adapter work with Linux using ndiswrapper, I've pretty much given up.

In all cases, I can get the wireless adapter to light up, and I can find a wireless network. I just can't get a DHCP connection started.

Doing the instructions in Ubuntu was fairly straightforward. But since I don't have an Ubuntu install anywhere but this WiFi-free office, I couldn't test it.

So I did the procedure on my laptop in Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 and in Puppy Linux 3.00. The easiest configuration was in Puppy, which makes using ndiswrapper almost a pleasure. In both cases, I can find the wireless network but can't get a DHCP connection to work.

Configuring ndiswrapper (the open-source program that uses Windows drivers to make hardware work in Linux), I used the Windows XP, 2000 and 98 drivers, all of which worked equally poorly.

In my experience, newer wireless adapters are a bitch to get configured in Linux, whereas older adapters like my Orinoco WaveLAN Silver pretty much configure themselves.

As far as the Airlink AWLL3028, I don't have enough skill or patience to keep going with it. It's disappointing, but that's the breaks.

I was steered by a reader to this Linux Questions page, which lists many networking cards (wired and wireless) and how well they perform under Linux. But for newer cards, I think the best resource is the comments at Newegg, where there are many Linux users to weigh on on whether or not something works.

When my Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card "just worked" with every single Linux distribution I tried, I was happy.

When two el-cheapo cards from Airlink 101 didn't work with every single Linux distribution I tried, and still didn't work when I resorted to ndiswrapper and a console, I was unhappy.

Native drivers for the Airlink adapters (the most recent I've owned being an AWLL3028 USB model with the Realtek 8187b chipset) would help. A way of using ndiswrapper as sane as the one in Puppy Linux would also help.

I know -- A $10 wireless adapter with no guarantee of working with Linux is just buying trouble, albeit cheaply. I could've bought a used AWLL3026 Airlink adapter and been pig-in-shit happy; that one's supposed to work. Nobody told Fry's, where the 3028s look just like the 3026s, but have an entirely different chipset.

And I know the Linux kernel will catch up with the AWLL3028 eventually. But I have this damn thing now. And I want it to work -- with WPA, the whole shebang -- NOW.

I've been pretty lucky with wired Ethernet in Linux. There's never been a time when it hasn't worked. Wireless should be the same. Apple gets around the problem by only supporting its own wireless adapters. Microsoft has the whole industry writing multiple drivers for every product. And still I've had problems with wireless in Windows.

This is a chance for Linux -- and the Linux community to do it right. The more support at the kernel level, as well as in the surrounding applications in every distribution, the better.

So either we make it all plug-and-play -- and publicize the hell out of which exact wireless equipment is compatible, or we have native drivers and an easy way to install them.

Hardware detection and configuration is important, and wireless is a huge part of that. Linux can win with it, but it sure can't win without it.

After not succeeding in getting the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 USB wireless adapter working in Debian Lenny and Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0, my first thought was to install Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), since I had a trouble-free ndiswrapper experience on my test box in Ubuntu 6.06, but since there's no WiFi in this building, I can't really see if it works, short of hauling the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client home ... with all the drives haphazardly connected to it. No, not going to do that.

I'm disappointed that I couldn't get the wireless adapter working in Wolvix. I could see the network with iwconfig, but I just couldn't get DHCP running properly.

So I went back to my Linux roots: Puppy.

I've been running Puppy 3.00 on this laptop for awhile -- I have the CPU fan managed by a cron job (Gcrontab is a bitch ... I'd rather have regular crontab anyday ... and I wish the Puppy people would fix it so crontab works with the e3 console editor ... it's hard-wired somehow to vi, which isn't part of Puppy).

So I hooked up the Airlink adapter, fired up Puppy, used the network setup wizard ... navigated to the "more" part of searching for networking drivers, selected ndiswrapper, navigated to the part of the drive on which I have a copy of the Windows 98 driver for the Airlink ... and the thing lights up.

It's the clearest, easiest configuration with ndiswrapper I've tried so far. Let's see if it works. (I'm not above trying Ubuntu, and I'll probably do that at some point).

Now all I have to do is get the laptop somewhere there's a live WiFi connection to see whether or not I can actually get wireless networking flowing.

Update on 2/4/08: So far I've gotten the computer to recognize the wireless adapter in Ubuntu 6.06, Wolvix 1.1.0 and Puppy 3.00. The latter two I've tried in the presence of actual wireless networks, but I still can't get a DHCP connection. I doubt it'll work in Ubuntu, either. In Debian Lenny, I got stopped at modprobe ndiswrapper, which didn't work.

(Original post begins here ... proceed knowing that this so far hasn't worked for me)

Only a few days ago I said I never had any luck with ndiswrapper -- the program that enables you to use Windows drivers to configure networking devices in Linux and BSD.

A few months ago, when I heard that the Airlink 101 AWLL3026 USB Wi-Fi adapters, which go for $10 at Fry's during periodic sales, worked out of the box in many Linux distributions, I decided to buy one.

Well, it turns out that I got the newer model, the AWLL3028, which has an entirely different chipset -- it's a Realtek 8187b. It didn't work with anything. I couldn't even get it to work in Windows XP without the driver.

Anyhow, I decided to Google my way into the problem today, and I found the following:

You need to use the Windows 98 driver to get the AWLL3028 to work with ndiswrapper

How to install and configure ndiswrapper in Ubuntu

How to troubleshoot your wireless connection, especially with the Realtek 8187, in Ubuntu

A modified Linux driver for the Realtek 8187b, with explanation

Hacking the RTL8187b

I knew it was only a matter of time before a wireless adapter sold for $10 at Fry's became usable in Linux. Let's hope it's plug-and-play -- and we won't have to do any of this -- very soon (perhaps in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS).

I decided to try ndiswrapper on my test box running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. Instead of downloading and compiling my own ndiswrapper, I just searched for it in Synaptic and installed it from there.

Then I did the following:

Go to Places -- Home Folder and make a new folder (or "directory" if you want to put it that way) -- call it wireless -- for the two Windows drivers. Then open the new wireless folder.

Then, put the Windows driver CD in the CD drive, open it with the file manager (double-click on the CD icon on the desktop).

In the CD window, navigate to the Windows 98 folder and drag the two drivers, with filenames rtl8187B.sys.sys and net8187b.inf, into the wireless folder.

Then open a Terminal window and do the following:

You should already be in your home directory, so chage to the new wireless directory you made:

$ cd wireless

Now start using ndiswrapper to make your new wireless driver:

$ sudo ndiswrapper -i net8187b.inf

Verify the installation:

$ ndiswrapper -l

Put the ndiswrapper module into the Linux kernel:

$ sudo depmod -a

$ sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

Then run dmesg and look for something like "ndiswrapper version version loaded" in the output:

$ dmesg

Create an alias for wlan0:

$ sudo ndiswrapper -m

Make sure ndiswrapper is loaded at boot:

$ echo "ndiswrapper" | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

Then reboot. At this point my wireless adapter began flashing, and wlan0 was among the choices System -- Administration -- Networking.

But since there's no wireless in this room, I'll have to try again tonight, except this time in Debian Lenny or Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0. (In those, instead of sudo, I'll just open a root shell with su).

Thanks to Kevdog, from whom I got all of this information. I made some modifications to his instructions, substituting pointing and clicking for work in the terminal (and leaving off a few precautionary checks) where possible.

And I'll tell you later whether or not this actually worked. I did this all in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, but I don't see why it wouldn't work in Debian, a newer version of Ubuntu, or just about any other version of Linux (I plan to try in Puppy and Damn Small Linux at some point, too).