Encore Electronics PC card/ lost noob!!

Hi, just another utterly noob guy.
I've read till I'm crosseyed and though I don't like to clutter forums with questions if I can find the answer on my own, I'm stumped this time. Hoping someone can throw me a bone here. I'm fairly compentent in the windows environment but am brand new to linux. Here's the situation: I had a dinosaur of a laptop sitting in the closet. 363 GHZ, 128 ram, 4 gig HD (Dell) My daughter wants a netbook so I though I'd look into resurecting that old laptop with Linux. The laptop had windows XP on it (wife bought it on ebay a couple years back) Obviously XP made it unusably slow. After reading up a bit I decided on the DSL distro. (damn small linux). I made my image CD last night, booted it up on the laptop, followed an online guide on partitioning the hard drive to DSL, and it all went perfectly. Took about 20 minutes and i now have a linux laptop. I was surprised at how well the initial install went.

But, of coarse, I have a problem. I cannot figure out how to configure the thing for internet access. I use a netgear wireless router and the laptop has a Encore Electronics 11 Mbps Wireless PC Card (CardBus) model ENPWI-B-RECA. I don't know if the card is supported by DSL and if so, what do I do to get it working and if not, are there any Linux distros that will work on that laptop that does support that particular card? I'm a nood as you can likely see by this post so I apologize if the answer is out there already and I didn't find it. Any help would be very much appreciated!

Thanks, Brian

More info is needed before we can offer any help. Please read the post linked to below.
It explains the info needed, and how to find it.

Wireless setup - Start Here

Quote:

I don't know if the card is supported by DSL and if so, what do I do to get it working and if not, are there any Linux distros that will work on that laptop that does support that particular card?

As waterhead said, we need more info on the card to give specific advice.

I do recommend trying something other than DSL. It sadly appears that it is no longer developed. With 128MB RAM you will be able to get satisfactory performance out of some more current lightweight distros, that will also have better hardware support (though can't guarantee the card will work out of the box.)

I recommend trying
Puppy Linux
Antix

Those would be my top two recommendations.

Slitaz
Their hardware support is a little more limited and there are less available binary packages for it. But very fast and light.

Vector Linux Light
For some reason, I've never cared for Vector Linux. I can't put my finger on why. But many people think it's great, so worth a try. Make sure you're grabbing the light edition if you try.

Thank you for the replies. After more research yesterday, I installed Linux Puppy last night. I thought I had the problem fixed after the install as the link light came on on the wireless card but still no connetion. I entered the IP, gateway, etc. from my routers info page, but still no connetion. I was going to try the wrapper app. in puppy to get the the windows driver to work with the wireless card but when I originally installed DSL (before puppy), I did a complete intall to my hard drive and now windows is no longer available on that computer. I also did the auto-probe thing and tried all the modules avalable. None worked. I know from the first reply that I need to provide more info, but I'm at work, and didn't bring the laptop with me so I can't really take any action or provide more info until tonight at the earliest. In the meantime, I'm wondering if and how I could somehow re-install the windows driver for the card and use the wrapper app to make it work in puppy, or I guess I just wonder what next (other than provide more info to you experts).

Ndiswrapper is rarely necessary these days. If it does happen to be the only option, you can almost certainly find the windows driver online.

Such as apparently here: Download Encore ENPWI-B-RECA Driver Driver for Windows 9X/ME/NT/2K/XP/2003/Vista/XP X64/2008 - Softpedia

According to this post on the Linux Mint forums, it's possible (but not certain) that your card is a Realtek rtl8180. We'll still want the info to confirm. That card should work though.

Quote:

I entered the IP, gateway, etc. from my routers info page, but still no connetion.

Are you trying to setup a static ip address? usually you don't need to do all of this if you're using DHCP.

How to Set up a Wireless Network in Puppy Linux (with pictures) - wikiHow
I assume your router is already setup, so just skip down to connectin to a network.

Thanks a ton reed9 for helping me out like this. I do appreciate it.

I was trying to put in the static IP, but only after I tried the DHCP and still had no connection. As you can likely tell by my posts, I'm a little bit lost here.

I did find the windows driver online, but wasn't sure how to get it onto the laptop correctly. If Ndiswrapper is likely unnecessary, I'll continue to try to get it to work without it.

I looked at the link on installing a wireless network in puppy that you provided an it seems to me that that was what I did last night, but I just couldn't get a module to work with the card.

I think you are correct that the mint link shows my card is the Realtek rt18180. (Why are we not certain, as my exact model number or my card is in that list under the Realtek rt18180?) if it is that card, what wouldbe the next step?

Quote:

(Why are we not certain, as my exact model number or my card is in that list under the Realtek rt18180?)

Sometimes vendors will sell different chipsets under the same model name.

The next step is still to get more info. Beyond identifying the card, the commands in the Wireless Setup sticky will help us identify if the module is loading.

Additionally, the output of following would be useful. (Assuming it is the rtl8180 and assuming iwconfig shows a wireless interface named wlan0)

Code:

iwconfig dmesg | grep 8180 dmesg | grep wlan0

I remeber that it does show a wirelss interface named wlan0.

I will try to get the info from the wirelss sticky tonight. Being new to this, I hope I can figue out how. I know it's explained in the sticky, but when your new to Linux, it is a bit daunting, to me anyway. Wish me luck.

OK Here we go

I finally got around to running the WirelessSetup Bash script from the sticky to hopefully provide the nedded info. It's all greek to me, but here it is;

=========== lspci ============

============ lsusb ============

============ lsmod ============
Module Size Used by
parport_pc 29828 1
lp 9476 0
parport 34508 2 parport_pc,lp
snd_pcm_oss 37440 0
snd_seq_dummy 2608 0
snd_seq_oss 27648 0
snd_seq_midi_event 6892 1 snd_seq_oss
snd_seq 48464 5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_seq_device 6968 3 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq
snd_mixer_oss 15820 1 snd_pcm_oss
battery 10032 0
snd_nm256 65868 0
snd_ac97_codec 98604 1 snd_nm256
ac97_bus 1516 1 snd_ac97_codec
snd_pcm 72496 3 snd_pcm_oss,snd_nm256,snd_ac97_codec
snd_page_alloc 8852 1 snd_pcm
snd_timer 20340 2 snd_seq,snd_pcm
snd 56516 9 snd_pcm_oss,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_seq_device,snd _mixer_oss,snd_nm256,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_ti mer
soundcore 6912 1 snd
evdev 9472 0
serio_raw 5168 0
i2c_piix4 9788 0
pcspkr 2284 0
apm 16808 1
i2c_core 23776 1 i2c_piix4
intel_agp 25788 1
shpchp 31616 0
agpgart 34188 1 intel_agp
pci_hotplug 28140 1 shpchp
fuse 53800 0
aufs 137092 1
nls_iso8859_1 3724 2
nls_cp437 5356 1
usbhid 26112 0
usb_storage 51584 2
squashfs 22928 1
uhci_hcd 21564 0
usbcore 138160 4 usbhid,usb_storage,uhci_hcd
yenta_socket 23544 3
rsrc_nonstatic 11276 1 yenta_socket

============ dmesg-firmware ============

============ kernel version ============
2.6.30.5

============ ifconfig ============
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

============ iwconfig ============
============ lspci ============

============ lsusb ============

============ lsmod ============
Module Size Used by
parport_pc 29828 1
lp 9476 0
parport 34508 2 parport_pc,lp
snd_pcm_oss 37440 0
snd_seq_dummy 2608 0
snd_seq_oss 27648 0
snd_seq_midi_event 6892 1 snd_seq_oss
snd_seq 48464 5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_seq_device 6968 3 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq
snd_mixer_oss 15820 1 snd_pcm_oss
battery 10032 0
snd_nm256 65868 0
snd_ac97_codec 98604 1 snd_nm256
ac97_bus 1516 1 snd_ac97_codec
snd_pcm 72496 3 snd_pcm_oss,snd_nm256,snd_ac97_codec
snd_page_alloc 8852 1 snd_pcm
snd_timer 20340 2 snd_seq,snd_pcm
snd 56516 9 snd_pcm_oss,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_seq_device,snd _mixer_oss,snd_nm256,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_ti mer
soundcore 6912 1 snd
evdev 9472 0
serio_raw 5168 0
i2c_piix4 9788 0
pcspkr 2284 0
apm 16808 1
i2c_core 23776 1 i2c_piix4
intel_agp 25788 1
shpchp 31616 0
agpgart 34188 1 intel_agp
pci_hotplug 28140 1 shpchp
fuse 53800 0
aufs 137092 1
nls_iso8859_1 3724 2
nls_cp437 5356 1
usbhid 26112 0
usb_storage 51584 2
squashfs 22928 1
uhci_hcd 21564 0
usbcore 138160 4 usbhid,usb_storage,uhci_hcd
yenta_socket 23544 3
rsrc_nonstatic 11276 1 yenta_socket

============ dmesg-firmware ============

============ kernel version ============
2.6.30.5

============ ifconfig ============
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

============ iwconfig ============

The lspci output isn't showing. What happens when you just enter lspci in a terminal?