Install wifi on a Raspberry Model A without ethernet

[Mithotyn]

Hi all,

i want to install piCore on a Raspberry Model A+. As you know, this model does not have an ethernet interface.
I will use an Edimax Wifi USB Stick to connect to my network.

What is the best way to add wifi support to piCore without the possibillity to use "tce-load -wi" to automatically download and install the extensions with all dependencies?

What i have done so far:
- Downloaded all TCZs from repo, manually resolved the dependencies by looking up every .DEP file by hand.
- Copied all TCZs to SD card. (Won't fit, so i had to remove some files from boot partition (Windows can't mount the linux partition))
- Ran piCore and "tce-load -i" the local extenions. As i did not copied the .DEP files as well, tce-load won't install all dependend TCZ automatically, so i had to install each TCZ explicitly.
- tce-load -i will not update onboot.lst and will not copy the TCZ to /optional/ folder. So installing wifi it is not persistent.

This is extremly exhausting .... :-/

Some suggestions to speed this up?

Thanks in advance!
Joachim

[patrikg]

As for many drivers in linux you could just load the module and the firmware.
I think Edimax Wifi USB Stick has Realtek Semiconductor RTL8192CU but you could do some investigations to see what hardware it is.

Or just load:
wifi.tcz
wireless-4.9.22-piCore.tcz
firmware-rtlwifi.tcz

And then just check what modules loaded and firmware and make you own extension. To load.

Or append to the file piCore.tcz.

[polikuo]

Some suggestions to speed this up?

Download the *.tree file to see which files are going to be copied.

For instance, TC.tcz.tree.

Remove the white spaces and sort -u to get a full list of extensions.

Copy them along with the *.dep *.md5.txt files and you are good to go.

Note that sometimes the "-KERNEL.tcz" extensions may be named differently.