stream303
January 5th, 2009, 07:30 PM
Thanks to ringsofsaturn for motivating me not to give up! He basically showed that the old urban-legend about usb wireless not working on Apple ppc boxes is not true.
To save some time, (and being a post that could really just go into the networking forum now that everything works) I'll post some quick details here hoping that it might inspire other ppc owners not to give up the ship.
Ok, right now I'm running Debian Lenny, but this should work with Ubuntu just fine.
1) Using a Netgear WG111v2 usb stick. Made sure that the side of the box had "v2" in it. Nice to see gpl-licensing leaflets fall on the floor.
2) Got the ralink-firmware from the repos and installed via synaptic. apt-get install fine too.
3) Disabled (uninstalled) Network Manager. This caused problems on my ibook in the past, so I decided to take one more problem out of the equation. :)
4) To make a long story short, I'm editing /etc/network/interfaces directly, and not running wpa. Even though wpa-supplicant was installed, I couldn't get that to work for some reason. Maybe a project for later, but too burned out with it now. Fell back to using WEP-128 bit key in router. Also relying on hex-keys rather than ascii passcodes.
(Maybe THAT is the ppc-specific gotcha - I wonder if wpa is supported on ppc?)
5) Contents of my /etc/network/interfaces file (the essid and hex key passphrase are obviously bogus - use your own)
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
# My custom wireless setup
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless-key 6a322f2b
wireless-essid magical
And now, I did come across a disconnect a few times, so I dropped the speed back to 11M in /etc/rc.local by adding an iwconfig line before exit 0 :
# By default this script does nothing.
iwconfig wlan0 rate 11M fixed
exit 0
I made sure my router's channel was at least 2 channels away from my neighbors, and by dropping the rate a little bit, I'll see if I still suffer from any random disconnects. If so, I'll play with 24M, 11M, 5.5M, 2M and 1M if need be.
So far, so good!
To save some time, (and being a post that could really just go into the networking forum now that everything works) I'll post some quick details here hoping that it might inspire other ppc owners not to give up the ship.
Ok, right now I'm running Debian Lenny, but this should work with Ubuntu just fine.
1) Using a Netgear WG111v2 usb stick. Made sure that the side of the box had "v2" in it. Nice to see gpl-licensing leaflets fall on the floor.
2) Got the ralink-firmware from the repos and installed via synaptic. apt-get install fine too.
3) Disabled (uninstalled) Network Manager. This caused problems on my ibook in the past, so I decided to take one more problem out of the equation. :)
4) To make a long story short, I'm editing /etc/network/interfaces directly, and not running wpa. Even though wpa-supplicant was installed, I couldn't get that to work for some reason. Maybe a project for later, but too burned out with it now. Fell back to using WEP-128 bit key in router. Also relying on hex-keys rather than ascii passcodes.
(Maybe THAT is the ppc-specific gotcha - I wonder if wpa is supported on ppc?)
5) Contents of my /etc/network/interfaces file (the essid and hex key passphrase are obviously bogus - use your own)
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
# My custom wireless setup
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless-key 6a322f2b
wireless-essid magical
And now, I did come across a disconnect a few times, so I dropped the speed back to 11M in /etc/rc.local by adding an iwconfig line before exit 0 :
# By default this script does nothing.
iwconfig wlan0 rate 11M fixed
exit 0
I made sure my router's channel was at least 2 channels away from my neighbors, and by dropping the rate a little bit, I'll see if I still suffer from any random disconnects. If so, I'll play with 24M, 11M, 5.5M, 2M and 1M if need be.
So far, so good!