Networking cards not supported

[Lauren2008]

I have a Dell Inspiron 9300 with broadcom 440x ethernet card and intel pro/wireless 2200BG card.

I have several threads mention the broadcom card is not supported by knoppix.

I have seen some other entry somewhere saying the intel card does not work in certain cases.

I have successfully booted knoppix (knoppix-std actually, running knoppix v3.2 I think) and can ping the 127.0.0.1 loopback.

When I run netcardconfig it says my cards are not supported.

I tried ndiswrapper and it says the wireless driver is not supported.

Am I just up the creek without a paddle on this particular laptop? I.e both my ethernet and wireless card are unsupported?

Thanks Lauren

[Harry Kuhman]

First of all, let me state clearly that I don't know your particular hardware.

I do know that Knoppix has a lot of problems with wireless cards, and there are many factors here, from devices that the manufacturer will not release specs for to the Linux community to poor support on Knoppix's part for the devices that are supported in other Linux distros to whatever has been done in the 5.x versions that is keeping me from using the one card that did work for me in 4.02.

But I have had very good luck with wired connections. I know that Broadcom made some wireless devices that I doubt you will get working easily with Knoppix, but at this point I would not have expected any wired connection problems. There were indeed some issues when the 10/100/1000 hardware first came out, as Knoppix has a long lead time and it took a while to catch up to the newer hardware. But I would have expected it to support your wired connection.

Are you sure that your wired connection is not working? Can you post ifconfig info and any other related information that might help here? What is your network configuration (I'm expecting that you are connecting to a local router, but we might as well be sure about that and even give the make and model of the router).

While I have no experience with your hardware and indeed you might have an issue that I'm not aware of, I'm hopeful that you can get wired networking working.

[Lauren2008]

Hi Harry

Thanks for helping.

The ifconfig reports I only have a l0 loopback interface. I can ping it fine.

I've tried various other commands such as dmesg and lsmod trying to figure out what kind of network cards are installed but they report nothing as far as I can see. The initial startup/boot text has no mention of network hardware as far as I can see. Since I am a newb, I may be missing something in all the text.

I am not running a vanilla knoppix live CD. Rather, the knoppix-std version.

I used the boot cheat codes "knoppix acpi=off pnpbios=off noapic noapm screen=1280x1024" Every other combination I tried resulted in a limited shell without xwindow started. But I tried only about 20 combinations of cheat codes out of maybe 100s of possible combinations.

I tried the instructions in the knoppix.net network_faq (using netcardconfig and ndiswrapper), but no luck getting any drivers to load (ndiswrapper says oem6.inf is unsupported). netcardconfig says no supported cards could be found.

I tried downloading a Linux-based 4400 driver using instructioons from the accompanying README.TXT from broadcom.com and building it in a knoppix shell window, but the makefile returns errors with no resulting driver built to try to load.

When I instead boot into XP OS, the wireless and ethernet cards work fine.

I ftp'd the knoppix-std-0.1.iso image from ftp://mirror.cs.vt.edu/pub/Knoppix-STD

I'm most interested in the ethernet (as opposed to wireless). Wireless is optional.

Is it possible my boot cheat codes are incorrect, and though it seems to start OK, the networking is being zonked because of incorrect cheat codes?

Thanks

First of all, let me state clearly that I don't know your particular hardware.

I do know that Knoppix has a lot of problems with wireless cards, and there are many factors here, from devices that the manufacturer will not release specs for to the Linux community to poor support on Knoppix's part for the devices that are supported in other Linux distros to whatever has been done in the 5.x versions that is keeping me from using the one card that did work for me in 4.02.

But I have had very good luck with wired connections. I know that Broadcom made some wireless devices that I doubt you will get working easily with Knoppix, but at this point I would not have expected any wired connection problems. There were indeed some issues when the 10/100/1000 hardware first came out, as Knoppix has a long lead time and it took a while to catch up to the newer hardware. But I would have expected it to support your wired connection.

Are you sure that your wired connection is not working? Can you post ifconfig info and any other related information that might help here? What is your network configuration (I'm expecting that you are connecting to a local router, but we might as well be sure about that and even give the make and model of the router).

While I have no experience with your hardware and indeed you might have an issue that I'm not aware of, I'm hopeful that you can get wired networking working.

[Harry Kuhman]

I am not running a vanilla knoppix live CD. Rather, the knoppix-std version.

Knoppix-std isn't Knoppix, it's a very very old and outdated Live CD based on an old version of Knoppix, if I remember right it was supposedly intended for a focus on network security. I haven't seen an update in years.

If you want a security oriented live CD, I suggest looking at Backtrack 3. It may well support your wireless device and certainly should support your wired connection.

If you just want a small Live Linux distro, I suggest looking at Puppy Linux. Puppy is small, but has much better wifi support than Knoppix. It might support your wifi device and again I expect it will support your wired NIC.

If you want Knoppix, then use Knoppix, not something else that included Knoppix in the name. The newer versions are very likely to support your wired device, but I have very low expectations of support for wifi devices in any 5.x Knopix release.

[Lauren2008]

I am going to a class, and they require I use knoppix-std.

I have no choice.

Sounds like my laptop H/W is not supported on knoppix-std.

Thanks.

I am not running a vanilla knoppix live CD. Rather, the knoppix-std version.

Knoppix-std isn't Knoppix, it's a very very old and outdated Live CD based on an old version of Knoppix, if I remember right it was supposedly intended for a focus on network security. I haven't seen an update in years.

If you want a security oriented live CD, I suggest looking at Backtrack 3. It may well support your wireless device and certainly should support your wired connection.

If you just want a small Live Linux distro, I suggest looking at Puppy Linux. Puppy is small, but has much better wifi support than Knoppix. It might support your wifi device and again I expect it will support your wired NIC.

If you want Knoppix, then use Knoppix, not something else that included Knoppix in the name. The newer versions are very likely to support your wired device, but I have very low expectations of support for wifi devices in any 5.x Knopix release.

[Harry Kuhman]

I am going to a class, and they require I use knoppix-std.

I have no choice.

Pretty strange and rather dubious requirement for a Live CD that wasn't all that great to begin with, never got past version zero point one (0.1) and hasn't been updated in over 4 years.

You may wish to ask around the class, I suspect that others who don't have aging hardware may also be seeing lots of hardware problems with this distro. A mass appeal may be more helpful than an individual appeal, or just resignation on the part of the students.

I'm not clear on what the class is, but if it's security related you might ask the instructor about Backtrack 3, which should have better or similar tools, and certainly more updated tools. If I were teaching such a class, I would find it wery hard to justify to my superiors the selection of software that so poorly supports most modern computers.

And I'm not certain that you're out of luck with std and your hardware, but there is just a lot of stuff that a 4 year old distro based on an even older Knoppix distro isn't going to have support for. Based on your only seeing the loopback port in ifconfig, is suspect that you NIC is one of them.