The next Airlink 101 AWLL3028 candidate: Puppy Linux
After not succeeding in getting the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 USB wireless adapter working in Debian Lenny and Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0, my first thought was to install Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), since I had a trouble-free ndiswrapper experience on my test box in Ubuntu 6.06, but since there's no WiFi in this building, I can't really see if it works, short of hauling the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client home ... with all the drives haphazardly connected to it. No, not going to do that.
I'm disappointed that I couldn't get the wireless adapter working in Wolvix. I could see the network with iwconfig, but I just couldn't get DHCP running properly.
So I went back to my Linux roots: Puppy.
I've been running Puppy 3.00 on this laptop for awhile -- I have the CPU fan managed by a cron job (Gcrontab is a bitch ... I'd rather have regular crontab anyday ... and I wish the Puppy people would fix it so crontab works with the e3 console editor ... it's hard-wired somehow to vi, which isn't part of Puppy).
So I hooked up the Airlink adapter, fired up Puppy, used the network setup wizard ... navigated to the "more" part of searching for networking drivers, selected ndiswrapper, navigated to the part of the drive on which I have a copy of the Windows 98 driver for the Airlink ... and the thing lights up.
It's the clearest, easiest configuration with ndiswrapper I've tried so far. Let's see if it works. (I'm not above trying Ubuntu, and I'll probably do that at some point).
Now all I have to do is get the laptop somewhere there's a live WiFi connection to see whether or not I can actually get wireless networking flowing.
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"I wish the Puppy people would fix it so crontab works with the e3 console editor...." --
The default for crontab and many other tools (like visudo) is vi, whether it's installed or not. I agree it's sloppy if the following variables aren't set when the default isn't included and/or if there aren't links to what is included.
Try this:
# echo $EDITOR
If it says vi or vim or is empty, use export to change it to whatever you want:
# export EDITOR=your-preferred-editor
That's good per session. To make it permanent, just set the EDITOR= variable in your .bashrc (or config file for which ever shell you use).
"... it's hard-wired somehow to vi"
$ EDITOR=e3; export EDITOR
$ crontab -e