Recently in Wired Ethernet Category

I've been thinking about wired vs. wireless networking over the past few days as I plan a new home network in my mind.

And I remembered a device that just might solve a problem you're having.

What if you have a laptop or desktop computer that, for whatever reason, either can't or won't play nice with wireless? Either you can't get a wireless card (PCI or PCMCIA/CardBus) to work with your box, or your OS (even Windows balks at some cards) won't recognize and configure it.

So what do you do? Here are a couple of devices I've never seen offered anywhere else. They're called Wireless Ethernet Adapters, and a company called MacWireless sells them.

The way they work is that you plug an Etnernet cable into the adapter and your PC — and I imagine that this device works with Macs, as well as PCs under Windows, Linux, or any BSD. Anything that uses wired Ethernet can seemingly go wireless with this device. Even an old Sparcstation ...

There are two models available, the MacWireless 11g Ethernet Adapter with 32 milliwatts of power for $99.98 (above right) and the High Power 11g Ethernet Adapter with 400 milliwatts of power for $189.98 (left).

You manage the device with a Web browser (see the PDF instructions for the 11g adapter and the high-power 11g adapter.)

Both of these boxes are expensive. If you can use a $20 Wi-Fi card with your laptop or desktop, that's probably the way to go. But if you have an older computer that just doesn't want to work with Wi-Fi, this is a very legitimate way to bring wireless networking to your Ethernet-equipped computer.

I've known about MacWireless for quite some time. I discovered the company way back in my early This Old Mac days when I was trying to make a Macintosh Powerbook 1400 work in the modern world (under System 7 no less). There are a few helpful Web sites out there on how to modify, expand and generally use older Apple hardware. This one from Penmachine.com led me to the Orinoco WaveLAN PCMCIA card that has been so very helpful to me with just about every laptop I've owned then and since (Linux and all the BSDs LOVE this card). It also pointed me to MacWireless, which is where I discovered these interesting Wi-Fi-to-Ethernet devices.

As far as technological solutions go, this is an idea that you'd think companies like Netgear and D-Link would've picked up on. But thus far, these units from MacWireless are the only things I know of that do what they do.

MacWireless has quite a few other interesting products, including full setups for Wi-Fi routers that can live outdoors and get what's called Power Over Ethernet, meaning they don't need 120-volt electricity to work. They also offer many Wi-Fi adapters for Macintoshes from the G3 and G4 era. This one looks like a good fit for my G4. I wonder if it works with Linux and OpenBSD ...

(Yes, I do have the OpenBSD T-shirt with this design. It doesn't get more geeky.)

I'm getting ready to give the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) to our daughter to run her educational games (Childsplay, Gcompris, TuxPaint) on Ubuntu Hardy with the non-crashing Xfce window manager instead of the crashy version of GNOME in this Ubuntu build.

To replace that machine for me, I pulled a Toshiba Satellite 1101-S101 laptop from the boneyard.

With a 1.3 GHz Celeron processor, 248 MB RAM (how it has this amount, I don't know) and a 20 GB hard drive, the specs are pretty similar to the Gateway, except for the Gateway's 1 GB of memory, which I'll probably split between the two machines.

The Toshiba came to me with Windows XP, and this time I wanted to preserve Windows and dual-boot it with a FOSS OS. The CD/DVD drive is extremely flaky. I think it's dying. It does better with "commercial" CDs, and I did get it to boot Partition Magic so I could shrink the NTFS Windows partition and set it up for Linux.

The only Linux CD I could boot was Debian's Etch and a Half. Something was squirrely on our network, and I couldn't get DNS working in the installer. I could've done a minimal install, fixed /etc/resolv.conf and then brought the rest of Debian into the box, but I took this opportunity to go in a different direction.

With all the CPU fan issue on the Gateway, I could never run OpenBSD (or NetBSD or even FreeBSD after the first boot) because I couldn't get the noisy CPU fan under control.

I powered up the Toshiba, which couldn't get networking in Windows either. Since I don't yet have the administrator password, I couldn't update the DNS settings.

I went to an OpenBSD mirror and downloaded a floppy image plus a DOS/Windows utility that helped me create a bootable OpenBSD install floppy. (Before anybody mentions this, I know I could've just as easily created a Debian boot floppy.)

The Toshiba successfully booted off the OpenBSD floppy, and I was able to plug in a mirror and do a full install over the network.

This was my first dual-boot install of OpenBSD, and after the install was done, the machine wouldn't boot at all. I hadn't installed a bootloader and thought the box would boot into Windows, where I planned to modify that bootloader to choose between Windows XP and OpenBSD. Instead I got a "no operating system" message.

And I don't have a Windows XP disc from which to "repair" the master boot record.

So I rebooted with the OpenBSD floppy, dropped down to a shell and added the OpenBSD bootloader at the prompt:

# fdisk -u wd0

Then I rebooted and was in OpenBSD. There is a GRUB package for OpenBSD, and I'll probably install that so I can easily dual-boot either Windows and OpenBSD or eventually Linux and OpenBSD. There are other alternatives as far as bootloaders go, but my familiarity with GRUB is what is governing my decision in this case.

I'm also going to add rsync as well. I have no skills when it comes to OpenBSD's dump and restore utilities, so having rsync is another plateful of Linux-like comfort food that will help me get along in OpenBSD.

Other packages I've installed thus far: nano, mc (the Midnight Commander file manager), Rox-filer (my favorite X file manager), Geany (X text editor) and the Firefox (I probably should've gotten the version with Java, but I'm going to try to add the Java developer's kit and get the Java runtime that way) and Opera Web browsers.

Opera came via a port and not a precompiled package, and it took a lot longer to install this time than the last time I installed it in OpenBSD (on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt), if I recall correctly.

When you download the ports tree and install from there, everything is fetched for you and compiled when needed. Looking at all the output in the terminal, it looks like these ports could never work, but in my experience with OpenBSD they always do. This time was no different. It took maybe 45 minutes to get all the dependencies plus Opera, but after that it worked immediately.

I've grown accustomed to OpenBSD's default window manager, Fvwm2, and I'll probably stick with it for at least awhile before adding any others. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, etc., installing an app in OpenBSD doesn't automatically update the menus, so you have to manage this yourself. Getting into the guts of the .fvwmrc file is more instructive than not, and once I figured out how to do it, it got less arduous.

I still don't like waiting for ports to download, compile and install, so having 4000+ precompiled packages for i386 is a very good thing.

After a year of strugging with and complaining about the Gateway fan blasting away under OpenBSD, I couldn't believe that I was running OpenBSD 4.4 on the Toshiba with no CPU fan problem whatsoever. Everything from autoconfiguration of my two network interfaces (one Realtek 8189 wired Ethernet, the other an Orinoco WaveLAN PCMCIA wireless) to a perfect xorg.conf made this OpenBSD install go .

I haven't checked audio yet, but I've never had OpenBSD fail to configure the sound card.

I've always read that most OpenBSD developers use laptops to code in the OS, and now that I have this Toshiba running OpenBSD better than anything I've tried before, I'm amazed at how well it installs and runs on this specific platform.

I've probably written a half-dozen posts about exactly why I'm running OpenBSD, and I'll probably write another one as time allows in the week ahead.

And I'll be either ordering a CD set or contributing directly to the OpenBSD project in the days ahead.