I see that the latest version of SliTaz cooking now has the airo_cs module available, which is the one i need to drive the Cisco Aironet 350 wireless card. But it still doesn't work.

I managed to install the regular version of SliTaz (2.6.30.6 kernel) on an ancient Toshiba 430-cdt, vintage around 1997, with 32 MB of RAM, and it's working slow but fine.

I have /etc/rcS.conf set up to load the airo_cs module at boot-up, which also automatically loads the airo module. But when i do

# ifconfig

the only result i get is the "lo" device. I use the same Aironet card successfully on a BasicLinux 3.5 system (kernel 2.2.26) on this same machine, and there it has the device name "eth0". But whether i try ifconfig with wlan0 or eth0, i get the same result:

error fetching interface information: device not found

Any idea what's wrong? If SliTaz has firmware available for this card, what is it called?

Sounds like your aironet is a pcmcia card and the module for the cardbus isn't loaded. Without the cardbus working your aironet is disconnected.

Can you

lspci

and see the cardbus and the aironet ?


According to the cisco documentation http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/wireless/wlan_adapter/350_cb20a/user/linux/configuration/guide/instlcfg.html
the firmware is in the adapter flash memory and is upgradeable.
Aironet is not in the get-wifi-firmware.tazpkg script.

hi mojo

I tried to run lspci and for some reason it didn't work on this machine ... maybe not enough memory? (32 mb). I even tried tazpkg get-install pciutils --forced, but it didn't help.

Anyway, since i have BasicLinux (2.2.26 kernel) installed in another partition and it works fine with the aironet, i rebooted into that and did lsmod. There was a driver loaded called i82365. So i rebooted back into SliTaz and loaded that module, and sure enough, the screen was filled with messages identifying "eth0".
I'm glad i was able to figure it out this way, because the name of that module would never have given me any clues.

So with a few ifconfig and iwconfig commands, i had the latest version of SliTaz up and running (albeit slowly on the openbox desktop) and on the internet in no time, on this ancient machine. It's a good thing that i enjoy using the command-line, because on this machine that is _much_ faster.

i82365 is the kernel module for the pcmcia card slot which the Cisco Aironet 350 wireless card plugs into on the Toshiba 430-cdt.

Glad you got her working with slitaz-cooking ;))

Please edit the title of this discussion and add [Solved]

Thanks :)