How install an external USB wireless adaptor?

[Mike7]

Hi, all.

My Asus 1000HA netbook came with a pretty good Atheros internal wireless adaptor, but it isn't capturing well enough the local wi-fi signals I'm piggy-backing onto. A few years ago I bought an external USB wireless adaptor (TP-LINK TL-WN422G), which I've used when needed while running WindowsXP on the hard drive. Now I'd like to use it with my pendrive CorePlus-5.1 installation, and I need your help to set it up.

Factoid: The driver for TP-LINK in WindowsXP is Atheros athuw.sys. Whether this driver came from the Windows driver store or was generic, I no longer remember. No CD came with the device.

I'll describe what I've done and what happened, and I'll give you all the information I was able to gather (be it related or not, as the case may be).

I disabled the internal wireless adaptor while in Windows XP, shut down, booted Core, and plugged the TP-LINK into a USB port.

The LED on the TP-LINK didn't go on.

I ran the TCL Wifi app and got the following message:

        Found wifi device wlan0
        Standby for scan of available networks...
        wlano   Interface doesn't support scanning: Network is down

        Set to try a few times to obtain a lease.
        Failed to connect.

In the terminal, I ran iw, ifconfig, and iwconfig and got the folowing results:

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tc@box:~$ iw dev
phy#1
        Interface wlan0
                ifindex 7
                wdev 0x100000001
                addr 00:25:86:e4:07:53
                type managed

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tc@box:~$ iwconfig wlan0
wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:off/any 
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=off   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off


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tc@box:~$ ifconfig wlan0
wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:25:86:E4:07:53 
          BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
In Control Panel>System Stats>dmesg, I found the following entries near the bottom:

usb 1-2: new high-speed USB device number 6 using ehci-pci
usb 1-2: ath9k_htc: Firmware htc_9271.fw requested
usb 1-2: ath9k_htc: Transferred FW: htc_9271.fw, size: 51272
ath9k_htc 1-2:1.0: ath9k_htc: HTC initialized with 33 credits
ath9k_htc 1-2:1.0: ath9k_htc: FW Version: 1.3
ath: EEPROM regdomain: 0x809c
ath: EEPROM indicates we should expect a country code
ath: doing EEPROM country->regdmn map search
ath: country maps to regdmn code: 0x52
ath: Country alpha2 being used: CN
ath: Regpair used: 0x52
ieee80211 phy1: Atheros AR9271 Rev:1

(Like I said, I have no idea if these dmesg stats, or indeed any of the above data, are related to the TP-LINK, they just look like they might be)

There was no entry for wlan0 in Control Panel>System Stats>net.

I don't know what other data to collect.

If you can help me get this TP-LINK wireless adaptor up and running, I will appreciate it a lot.

Cheers!

Mike

[Rich]

Hi Mike7
Don't you need to run something like:

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ifconfig wlan0 up

[Mike7]

Hi, Rich

Don't you need to run something like:

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ifconfig wlan0 up

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tc@box:~$ ifconfig wlan0 up
ifconfig: SIOCSIFFLAGS: Operation not permitted
Mike

[Rich]

Hi Mike7
Sorry, that probably should have been:

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sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

[Mike7]

Sorry, that probably should have been:

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sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

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tc@box:~$ sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
ifconfig: SIOCSIFFLAGS: Operation not possible due to RF-kill

[Rich]

Hi Mike7
Do a Google search for:

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ifconfig: SIOCSIFFLAGS: Operation not possible due to RF-killfor possible solutions. There is an  rfkill  extension in the repository that you will probably need.

[Mike7]

Hi, Rich.

Do a Google search for:

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ifconfig: SIOCSIFFLAGS: Operation not possible due to RF-killfor possible solutions. There is an  rfkill  extension in the repository that you will probably need.

Will give that a try and get back.

M.

[Rich]

Hi Mike7
I presume you have  wireless-KERNEL-tinycore.tcz  installed where the word  KERNEL  matches your kernel version. You can
find your kernel version with:

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uname -rYou will also probably need  firmware-zd1211.tcz

[Mike7]

Hi, Rich

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tc@box:~$ uname -r
3.8.13-tinycore
mnt/sdb1/tce/optional>
wireless-3.8.13-tinycore.tcz
firmware-zd1211.tcz

The Google search returned many entries with too many complicated and varied results to be useful.

M.

[Rich]

Hi Mike7
What does this return:

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sudo rfkill list all

[Mike7]

With the internal wireless adaptor on and the TP-LINK unplugged:

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tc@box:~$ sudo rfkill list all
0: eeepc-wlan: Wireless LAN
        Soft blocked: no
        Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
        Soft blocked: no
        Hard blocked: no

With the internal adaptor disabled and the TP-LINK still unplugged:

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tc@box:~$ sudo rfkill list all
0: eeepc-wlan: Wireless LAN
        Soft blocked: yes
        Hard blocked: no
With the internal adaptor disabled and the TP=LINK plugged in:

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tc@box:~$ sudo rfkill list all
0: eeepc-wlan: Wireless LAN
        Soft blocked: yes
        Hard blocked: no
3: phy2: Wireless LAN
        Soft blocked: yes
        Hard blocked: no

[Mike7]

Hi, Rich.

When I downloaded rfkill.tcz from the repo, the info screen said this:

Add this command to your bootlocal.sh:
sudo /usr/local/etc/init.d/rfkill start

Is this necessary? What does it do?

Mike

[Rich]

Hi Mike7
It is a script used to set which devices are blocked or unblocked. It gets that configuration information from
/usr/local/etc/conf.d/rfkill. The default configuration is to unblock all devices. No, you do not need to run it.
I'm guessing that  phy2  is your USB device. Try:

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sudo rfkill unblock 3

[coreplayer2]

IMO the rfkill method appears a little too complicated for my comfort, don't misunderstand though..  am sure rfkill works great.    actually find that it's hard to remember whether to switch the device on or off when booting a  desired operating system, sometimes the built-in device is automatically re-enabled when it's least wanted..  so I work around this problem by disabling or (as the case may be) blacklisting the built-in device's driver.  then install the driver and/or firmware needed to support the external device and use a script to determine if wifi needs to be run at boot up.    It's an easy method and has proven extremely reliable for my notebooks, I boot up and always have the best connection available with the minimum of effort.

I'd  add the bootcode  blacklist=ath5k  to disable your onboard PCI WiFi device's driver, then

install only these two extensions

wifi.tcz  (plus deps obviously) and
firmware.tcz

should be all you require, then simply run wifi to connect
remove all unnecessary firmware extensions that you might have and you should be good to go..

I believe you'll find that
ath9k_htc (kernel mode driver supporting 0cf3:1006 is provided in wireless-3.8.13-tinycore.tcz which is a dep of wifi.tcz extension)
htc_9271.fw  (firmware supporting 0cf3:1006 is provided in firmware.tcz extension)

 

[tinypoodle]

Have you compared impact on energy consumption between rfkill vs. blacklisting?