So here is another frustrating, fun and challenging adventure I undertook. The goal of the project is to use an old laptop (Pentium III, 64mb ram) to create a good enough system that can serve as a portable internet tv. In other words, a box capable of running macromedia flash with sound, and do it wirelessly. Sounds simple enough right? Not when you have an old system.

So the choice of distribution (because of their superiority on old computers) was either DSL (Damn Small Linux) or Puppy Linux. The option of xubuntu has been ruled out because it seems to be less compatible than the above 2 (by that I mean, I can’t even install it, it get stuck on downloading a lib and complains it can’t read the disk. Yes I checked that the disc is working). So after burning many cds, approx. 5, on different distribution (live, installation only, messed up, etc.) I was finally able to get it to work. But not without many problems and lessons along the way.

The problem are as follows…

  • Started with Puppy 3.01 with wireless and flash from another adventure but without sound.
  • Installed DSL and got sound, but no flash (no wireless setup yet).
  • Reinstalled Puppy 4.0 got sound and flash, but couldn’t get wireless. (note: Puppy comes with flash installed)
  • Installed DSL and got sound and wireless, but no flash. I learned that flash is practically non working on DSL because it doesn’t have GTK2 unless installed as an addon. The addon for some reason didn’t work for me.
  • Installed DSL-N. DSL-N is a branch of DSL that supports GTK2 which in turn allows GTK2 flavor of firefox which allowed flash. So I’ve got flash and sound finally working under DSL-N. The bad thing is that flash crashed firefox in about 3 seconds. So that was no good. Back to headache.
  • Finally installed Puppy 4.0 again nd got flash and sound and after hours and hours of work wireless again. Apparently if I understand correctly the new Puppy distribution turned off pcmcia by default.

So That was it in a nutshell. Now a semi-tut for those who is having some of the trouble like me. Whether it is no sound in puppy, or not being able to enable your wireless card. So if sound is not working (it says nothing detected) after you tried using the “setup > ALSA Sound Wizard”Try running terminal and running

modprobe snd-trident

If wireless/ndiswrapper is not working, try running

modprobe yenta-socket

Then you can go about setting up your wireless like usual. Here is some tutorial that might help to install a network card (I used a Belkin. Model: F5D7010) on puppy linux. I know the second one is for Ubuntu, but it is the samething more or less. You just need some common sense (hint: Puppy doesn’t use sudo at all. Just omit it).

Once I got my wireless card on, I used Puppy’s built in network manager. Note: I’m using WPA security for my wireless. If you’re like me and you need to connect to a WPA protected router, follow this tutorial (same as the first link above). Now unlike him though, I like to start my wpa internet on boot. I’m not sure if this will break it if I’m not in range with my router. I haven’t tried it yet. so what I did was open “etc/rc.d/” and copied added a little script under line 299, or right below the “check_status” $status of network

#setup wireless…
echo -n “Setting up wireless…” >/dev/console
##v2.14 run rc.network as a backgrounded process, idea from ‘joki’… v3.00…
/etc/rc.d/rc.network &
echo -en “\\033[60G${color_green}" >/dev/console #at column 60.
echo -n "[done]” >/dev/console
echo -e “$color_normal” >/dev/console
#check_status $STATUS

And there you have it WPA enabled internet access on Puppy linux’s boot. Good luck!

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