Ndiswrapper (WiFi)

[mlidman]

As you may know quite a few wireless cards do not have native linux drivers that work with them. So people unfortunate enough to buy these cards with out reserching them first are stuck with ndiswrapper which wraps around the windows drivers for the card. However getting the drivers onto the computer is a hassle while the cdrom is being used by knoppix, and it's especialy anoying since you'll have to do this every time you boot. I've remasterd knoppix to include drivers for my wifi card but this really isn't that convinient or easy to do and it only works with my wifi card.

So does anyone know if there is a way add onto a knoppix disk without remastering it? I've tried to burn a knoppix disk without finalizing it and then burning on a few extra files but the disk didn't work (I think there was a CRC check or something).

If this could be done, any schmo could burn a customized version of knoppix with his perticular wifi drivers added to the disk. It would then just require a little init or hotplug script that looks on the disk for the users drivers and sets up ndiswrapper with them.

So i'm thinking of creating a custom knoppix disk that's 10 megs lite with a script to install user added wifi drivers for ndiswrapper.

[Harry Kuhman]

....So does anyone know if there is a way add onto a knoppix disk without remastering it? I've tried to burn a knoppix disk without finalizing it and then burning on a few extra files but the disk didn't work (I think there was a CRC check or something). .....

Unfortunately, when you add a second session to a bootable CD, the CD is no longer bootable. Thos is an unfortunate side effect of the way bootable CDs work and the way multi-session CDs work. It is not a Knoppix issue. So the second session approach isn't going to work.

There are sopme tools availablwe for editing ISO files. However, so far the only high level tools I've found are for Windows and are pay-to-use (around $30 price). Low level editing of the ISO might work for simple edits of a menu or configuration file, but seem unlikely to work well for complex operations like adding files. So unless someone has some free iso editing software, the only solution short of a remaster would seen to be pay software under windows.

I just had a thought - I wonder if it might be posiabe to add the files in the first session, the burn the bootable iso to the second. I have a lot of reservations thast this will work, but I have not tried it yet.

[mlidman]

I have had some success adding files to the knoppix iso. So if you've simply wanted to add files to the knoppix cd here is what ya got to keep in mind. If you've tried adding files before using a program like magiciso or winiso you'll get a checksum error when you try to boot. The problem is that in the boot/isolinux/boot.cat file has the wrong checksum in it. You'll need to update that file to get it to work. I don't think you can do that with winiso or magiciso. So here is what I did instead.

1. Use winrar to extract the iso file to a directory.

2. Add whatever files you want to the directory you extracted the knoppix iso to

3. Then use mkisofs from cdrtools (there is a version of this for windows)

here is the command line I used. I had extracted the cdrtools to d:/cdrtools/ and put my custom knoppix files in d:/cdrtools/cdiso

Change directory to d:\cdrtools\cdiso

Mkay now were ready to run mkisofs

..\mkisofs -o ../isoname.iso -R -J -V "Distro Name" -hide-rr-moved -v -d -N -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 32 -boot-info-table -b boot\isolinux\isolinux.bin -c boot\isolinux\boot.cat -A "Install CD" .

The final . is important... you'll end up with an iso file called isoname.iso

With this meathod I took knoppix 3.7 and added the drivers for my wifi card. Unfortunatly when I modprobe ndiswrapper everything crashed (but the wifi card like went on). Probobly because the ndiswrapper needs updating. It's version 0.8 on knoppix 3.7. ndiswrapper is upto 1.0 now