wlan0 is missing. What should I do to make wifi works?

[Dinir]

I have EeePC 1201N, and installed Xubuntu on it and it was pretty slow so I decided to try Tiny Core Linux on the netbook.

My first problem on using it is it seems not catching any wifi signal.

I was following this page (http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:setting_up_wifi), and the page suggests using 'wicd', 'wpa_gui' and a more advanced way with 'iwconfig' and so on.

wicd fails, as after installing and clicking the icon on wbar nothing happens.
wpa_gui asks me to add some code like this to bootlocal.sh in somewhere:
wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/opt/wpa.cfg -B
and says I should replace 'wlan0' with the name of my wireless card.

Name of my wireless card? I googled about finding it and some pages say I could use 'iwconfig' to get the name.
And this is the output of 'iwconfig':
ip_vti0   no wireless extensions.

dummy0    no wireless extensions.

lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

tunl0     no wireless extensions.

There is no wlan0. So it would be like it couldn't catch any wifi because there's no device for it (for Tiny Core's perspection at least).
I tried to find a way to get the wlan0 to appear (or which driver or anything like that should be installed to make it recognize wlan0), but no result came up.
And that wiki page assume that of course I can see wlan0 in the output so I can't follow the instruction now.

Where should I have to start to solve this problem?

[gerald_clark]

Start by installing wifi and wl-modules-KERNEL along with any firmware required.

[Dinir]

They're already installed and it doesn't solve the problem. I've checked /usr/local/tce.installed.

[Juanito]

What wifi hardware do you have?

You can use the lspci (from the pci-utils extension) command or the lsusb (from the usbutils extension) command to find out.

[Dinir]

lspci tells me I have these:
07:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8191SEvA Wireless LAN Controller (rev 10)
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR8132 Fast Ethernet (rev c0)

[Juanito]

That does not seem to be listed here:

http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:list_of_supported_wifi_devices

..but I'd guess that if you load the firmware-rtlwifi extension before the wifi extension, things might work.

Edit: After loading firmware-rtlwifi and then wifi, what does "dmesg | tail -20" show?

[coreplayer2]

I suspect this device is supported by the rtl8192se kernel module
despite  it slightly different model number

According to someone here
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1834478&page=2
the rtl8192se.ko works apparently
maybe this device will need a proprietary driver..?  there is one given at the above link whether it will build in 3.16.6 is another matter.

either firmware-rtl8192ce_se_de.tcz or firmware-rtlwifi.tcz
and
wireless-3.16.6-tinycore.tcz

are worth a try

[Dinir]

That does not seem to be listed here:

http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:list_of_supported_wifi_devices

..but I'd guess that if you load the firmware-rtlwifi extension before the wifi extension, things might work.

Edit: After loading firmware-rtlwifi and then wifi, what does "dmesg | tail -20" show?

atl1c 0000:09:00.0: no hotplug settings from platform
asus_wmi: Backlight controlled by ACPI video driver
sd 9:0:0:0: [sdc] 31116288 512-byte logical blocks: (15.9 GB/14.8 GiB)
sd 9:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
sd 9:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sd 9:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page found
sd 9:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
 sdc: sdc1
sd 9:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk
cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain
wl: module license 'unspecified' taints kernel.
Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LN4A] enabled at IRQ 18
rtl8192se: FW Power Save off (module option)
rtl8192se: Driver for Realtek RTL8192SE/RTL8191SE
Loading firmware rtlwifi/rtl8192sefw.bin
rtl8192se 0000:07:00.0: Direct firmware load failed with error -2
rtl8192se 0000:07:00.0: Falling back to user helper
ieee80211 phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'rtl_rc'
atl1c 0000:09:00.0: irq 41 for MSI/MSI-X

I don't sure but the output is different after first command.

[Dinir]

I suspect this device is supported by the rtl8192se kernel module
despite  it slightly different model number

According to someone here
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1834478&page=2
the rtl8192se.ko works apparently
maybe this device will need a proprietary driver..?  there is one given at the above link whether it will build in 3.16.6 is another matter.

either firmware-rtl8192ce_se_de.tcz or firmware-rtlwifi.tcz
and
wireless-3.16.6-tinycore.tcz

are worth a try

Thank you!



Putting firmware-rtl8192ce_se_de.tcz and wireless-3.16.6-tinycore.tcz in onBoot list made it!



So the problem was I need to get the driver for my card manually and I didn't know I would need that.
Next time if I got a similar problem that nobody seems to experiencing I could try find a driver for devices I have.

[Juanito]

It would be good if you could submit the details of your hardware requested in the wiki wifi link above so that others can profit from your findings 

[Juanito]

Code: [Select]

wl: module license 'unspecified' taints kernel.


It looks like the wl-modules-KERNEL extension is being loaded unnecessarily?

[Dinir]

I removed wl-modules-3.16.6-tinycore.tcz from onBoot list.

If I could interpret all messages in dmesg than I could probably find more extensions to remove from onBoot lists...
Thanks for telling me this one!