Fishbone_Beat

Hello all! First off I would like to say im new to this forums but not to linux in general, I have Ubuntu Karmic running on my machine and I am very active on the ubuntu forums so I THINK im not a complete noob, but Im still rookie in linux terms.

My problem regarding my laptop (Acer Aspire 5810TZ). I got Damn Small Linux (DSL) running on my USB drive without any problem, BUT, NONE of my network cards are working under DSL, its pretty weird because I have read everywhere that my type of card is recognized and configured "out of the box"

They both work in ubuntu like a charm so I figured that I could just see the driver that my Ubuntu installation is using and put the very same driver on DSL, problem is I dont know how to do it. Hence the laptop has not internet connectivity I cannot download packages or compile software because I dont have the build-essential installed or things like that.

I want it to work on the laptop because thats where I would install the MyDSL extensions and tweak the system to my needs, so I really need the help.

lspci recognizes the devices like this:
However, ifconfig doesnt show the devices, it just shows the loopback interface.

I tried loading this:

its suppossed to work right after I do this, but still the devices does not show on ifconfig.

Atheros chipset for wireless is AR928X.

If you need any other thing just let me know. Thanks in advance for the help.

PS: Wireless is critical that works, the other not so much but would be nice to get it working too.

reed9

The driver for that card is ath9k, which only works with kernel >=2.6.27. DSL still uses a 2.4 kernel doesn't it? I'm not sure, but it uses an old kernel.

You might be able to get it working with ndiswrapper.

Compatibility/Atheros - madwifi-project.org - Trac

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Fishbone_Beat

Indeed uses kernel 2.4 because of the increase in size it would represent to move to the new kernel. I find that ath9k driver and couldnt compile it (I run DSL embedded in windows with qemu) but there are some unresolved dependencies.

How does ndiswrapper works?

reed9

Ndiswrapper allows you to use some windows xp wireless drivers.
NdisWrapper - Debian Wiki

I think DSL has includes it by default. You would need to find the windows xp driver for your card.

You also might consider a different lightweight distro. I don't know if DSL is even developed anymore - they haven't put out a release in over a year and the forums are pretty dead. One of the former lead developers has started a new project, TinyCore Linux.

Other lightweight options are Slitaz, Antix, or Puppy Linux.

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Fishbone_Beat

Indeed DSL includes it by default. Indeed the forums are dead because they wont lets you post after you register...there is some bug there that wont let you verify your account.

About puppy linux Indeed I have heard of it, but it isnt as small as DSL.

Let me explain what I want. I have a 1Gb flash drive in which I want to get some small distro in to troubleshoot and as a rescue drive, while having the options to have my files and edit them on the go. Thats why I found DSL so good. I dont know if the other distros are capable of installing to a USB drive and run completely in ram and things like that. But hence I only knew DSL and puppy linux, I will check the other distros you mentioned then I will surely come back with the results.

And I havent noticed also that indeed the uploads to the FTP site mirror were more than a year old.

reed9

Puppy will easily fit on a 1 GB stick and the default is to run completely in RAM. The latest release, 4.3, should work out of the box with your wireless card. Puppy will also give you the most "general desktop" functionality out of the box.

If you really want something as small as you can get (only 10 MB!), TinyCore will also support your card, but it's a little more hands-on to set up.
Tiny Core Linux : Setting up Wifi

The current stable Slitaz will not, the kernel is too old. The recent development release has a recent kernel, so it may support your card out of the box.

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Fishbone_Beat

I will try 2 portable distros At the moment, One is SLAX, I found amazingly cool that you can personalize your download with the packages you need, also seems community is pretty active.

The other is puppy, I will give both a try in these days to come.

Also, about tiny core and slitaz. For such a small size (10mb and 30mb), im pretty sure all configuration is command-line driven, and slitaz has a diiferent package management system, and they both dont have a community as big as puppy or Slax I think.