Re: Creating my first LAN
On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 11:28:07AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
> On 03/30/2021 10:28 AM, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> > Richard,
> >
> > So: You have two laptops. Both installed from the first DVD. Never connected
> > to the Internet.
> >
> > Did you actually manage to install the firmware to make the WiFi cards work?
>
> Yes ;>
> One was old enough that the installer had the correct driver.
Which driver?
How installed? From firmware-linux-free?
> The driver for the other was available from the repository.
>
_Which_ repository?
For the one that required firmware:
How did you install it?
What firmware did you actually install
> >
> > Outwith that firmware, it is very unlikely that anything will work.
> > [And this goes back to one of the previous email chains].
>
> Justify that claim.
Most modern cards will require some firmware: the oldest of mine here requres firmware-intel-iwlwifi
for example. If you are lucky, that firmware will be in firmware-linux-free.
If you are less lucky, the driver will be non free and in firmware-linux-nonfree / firmware-misc-nonfree
[Which require Debian's non-free repositories to be enabled and an Internet conection / use of the
unofficial installer which includes firmware.]
If you're very unlucky, you may have to download the firmware from somewhere on the Internet, build kernel
modules etc. etc.
> The older unit had no problem connecting to the internet via the local
> library's public WiFi portal. [Haven't explicitly tried the other yet.]
>
See the questions above: so one of the laptops _has_ connected to the Internet - it's not just laptop1 and
laptop2 and no Internet connection ever?
> >
> > If you fire up one of the laptops, and run " dmesg | less " - do you find
> > references to WiFi hardware (and corresponding firmware being loaded) ?
> >
Have you got not only hardware physically in the laptop but the firmware/drivers needed to use it and is the
detection of the WiFi hardware working?
> > It doesn't really matter what ad-hoc networking you want to put in place:
> > absent the firmware, almost all Wifi hardware is a brick.
If you don't have the right firmware, WiFi won't work - see, for example, the Pine64 ARM machine sat by my
feet which has a strange Realtek wireless driver. The hardware is there, but the software will never work to
initialise it - for all intents and purposes, it doesn't exist and the firmware from Debian doesn't initialise
it at all. To make it work, I'd have to go and find source code in Github somewhere and hand build modules.
> The older (and
> > significantly slower) WiFi hardware where the firmware is contained in free
> > drivers is very rare now.
A couple of very old chipsets - some of them are sold by the FSF as Respects Your Hardware chipset, for
example.. One of them is an old TP-Link - the chipsets may only support 2.4GHz / slower speeds.
>
> Those two paragraphs do not {so to speak} compute.
> For more detail, see my response to David.
>
> >
> > All the very best, as ever,
> >
> > Andy C.
> >
> >
> >
>
>
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