My "other" box is wired and dual boot, so I never really had to figure this out. I'm running my new build (XP Pro) wirelessly on my home network. Since the new build is really, really new with leading edge hardware, and I don't want to do a full Linux install, I want to boot off of Knoppix or maybe Mepis and access the net via my wireless router. The questions are can I do that with a LiveCD, and how? I've done a little digging on wireless setup and configuration on Linux and I'm kind of baffled.
It's odd to me that Linux and wireless is such voodoo. Anyway...
I'm guessing it may be difficult with Knoppix but I wouldn't think impossible. After a little digging, it would seem I need to use "iwconfig" as opposed to "ifconfig". When I boot Knoppix while wired, it detects the network just fine. If I boot while not wired, it doesn't and sets the IP to localhost (127.0.0.1) and will only do a loopback on Eth0. Typing "iwconfig" basically tells me there are no devices, Knoppix didn't recognize the wireless adapter built in to the mobo and so essentially there is none. The mobo is an Asus P5AD2-E Premium. The adapter ( "Asus WiFi-g Onboard 3-in-1 Wireless LAN Adapter'", using a Marvel Windows driver) is 802.11B/G compliant. I would think Linux has 802.11 type of support resident in the average distro. Likely the issue is a driver specific to this adapter? Shouldn't some kind of generic 802.11 WiFi driver work? If so, how do I enable it? Or, if one is not native, where do I look for one? Maybe a bigger issue is since with Knoppix I can't write to the NTFS drive, is it possible at all? Or, could I load it on the fly since Knoppix is using a RAMDRIVE?
June 13th, 2005, 8:29 pm
