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Author Topic: I can't find a working tutorial that gets the wifi module installed.  (Read 7895 times)

Offline full-pixel

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Re: I can't find a working tutorial that gets the wifi module installed.
« Reply #15 on: December 23, 2020, 05:37:13 PM »
The extensions go in tce/optional ("optional" folder inside the "tce" folder) on the second partition. Add the names of the extensions on individual lines in the tce/onboot.lst file (edit it as a text file) if you want them to load on start-up.

It wouldn't let me paste it into the second partition either, optional copied with errors the contents of the wifi module. It also wouldn't let me make an opt folder within opt, as I tried that too. Some files were the same within optional.

So I'm still failing to do it so far. I really need a tutorial of some kind.

Edit: and yes I deleted the 2 and resized it and all properly so that there was space. It still said errors were made.
« Last Edit: December 23, 2020, 05:43:48 PM by full-pixel »

Offline polikuo

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Re: I can't find a working tutorial that gets the wifi module installed.
« Reply #16 on: December 24, 2020, 10:20:34 AM »
Hi

The latest stable release right now is piCore-12.0

I'm using RPI4, but the principles are the same.

You flash the image on your SD card and expand the second partition.

To get wifi working, you'll need firmware-rpi-wifi.tcz and wifi.tcz

Usually, we fetch the extensions along with their dependencies with tce-load

However, that requires internet connection.

So the work around is to download the files on other machine, and then you move it to where it should be.

In your case, the required files are: (piCore12)
Code: [Select]
firmware-rpi-wifi.tcz
wifi.tcz
wireless_tools.tcz
wireless-5.4.51-piCore.tcz
wpa_supplicant.tcz
libnl.tcz
openssl.tcz
ca-certificates.tcz
readline.tcz
ncurses.tcz

These files take less than 20MB of space, which should be able to fit in the first partition without deleting anything.

Download these extensions from http://tinycorelinux.net/12.x/armv6/tcz/

Store them in the first partition of your SD card with your windows 7

Boot up the machine, move them to your tce/optional
Code: [Select]
mount /mnt/mmcblk0p1
mv /mnt/mmcblk0p1/*.tcz /mnt/mmcblk0p2/tce/optional

Load the extensions to see if the wifi works
Code: [Select]
cd /mnt/mmcblk0p2/tce/optional
tce-load -i *.tcz
sudo wifi.sh

If everything goes well, generate the checksums and download the dep files
Code: [Select]
cd /mnt/mmcblk0p2/tce/optional
for F in *.tcz; do
  md5sum $F > ${F}.md5.txt
done
tce-audit updatedeps
tce-update
« Last Edit: December 24, 2020, 10:26:23 AM by polikuo »

Offline full-pixel

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Re: I can't find a working tutorial that gets the wifi module installed.
« Reply #17 on: December 31, 2020, 09:37:36 PM »
http://tinycorelinux.net/12.x/armv6/tcz/

I don't see how that leads to downloadable files. Should I just delete the files that don't belong within what I got from novaspirit's download? They seem to match names from what I'm seeing, but there's a bunch of stuff that isn't in your list that is there to delete.

But I don't get how to find extensions on this site of which is bothering me. 

Also, last time I tried it only had about 3 mb of space, so 20 would be too large from what I tried in the past.
« Last Edit: December 31, 2020, 09:47:47 PM by full-pixel »

Offline Rich

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Re: I can't find a working tutorial that gets the wifi module installed.
« Reply #18 on: December 31, 2020, 09:51:05 PM »
Hi full-pixel
http://tinycorelinux.net/12.x/armv6/tcz/

I don't see how that leads to downloadable files. ...
If you use anothe Linux machine, you can:
wget http://tinycorelinux.net/12.x/armv6/tcz/firmware-rpi-wifi.tcz

Or if you want, enter this into the address bar of your browser:
wget http://tinycorelinux.net/12.x/armv6/tcz/firmware-rpi-wifi.tcz
and it should ask you where you want to save it.

Offline full-pixel

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Re: I can't find a working tutorial that gets the wifi module installed.
« Reply #19 on: January 01, 2021, 12:41:03 AM »
After booting it up it fails to detect the keyboard this time with the files in the first partition using v12 without deletion of anything with a fresh image installed to it. It's happened before, it ignoring the keyboard, during random attempts, so I know the usb micro female works on the zero, and the keyboard works on the win7 I'm using to type this right now. So it didn't work I guess.

There was enough room though using v12 so I was wrong about that. It's the older versions that had no room it seems, not that it mattered.

I tried more than one otg also in case it was a short.

Furthermore while going over what might have happened and typing out this message, it was still on and after 2 minutes or so, maybe 3, the keys were generated. That's kind of slow for it to take minutes to boot up that way, it's never been that slow before. I thought I must have saved them, or the os did, but it was just taking minutes to generate the keys.

Could it take five minutes for the keyboard to be recognized randomly during this process or what am I to think?


Thanks for showing me how to download the files by the way, I would never have though to add them at the end of the url.

Offline Rich

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Re: I can't find a working tutorial that gets the wifi module installed.
« Reply #20 on: January 01, 2021, 01:04:19 AM »
Hi full-pixel
It sounds like maybe the random number generator is slow to build up entropy. That was also an issue here:
http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,24392.msg155790.html#msg155790

Offline full-pixel

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Re: I can't find a working tutorial that gets the wifi module installed.
« Reply #21 on: January 01, 2021, 03:05:09 AM »
I tried again and it told me write error and that there was no space left, when trying to move the files to optional, using v12. It gave me three write errors after deletion of /mnt/mmcblk0p2/tce/optional/ca-certificates.tcz/ and /mnt/mmcblk0p2/tce/optional/popenssl.tcz, then the mv had three write errors and that there was no space left.

Tried anyway and it told me thing swere already installed and that things were okay but  mounting /dev/loop9 on /tmp/tcloop/wireless-5.4.51-picore failed and that it was an invalid argument(s).

So I kept going anyway and then did sudo wifi.sh anyway and no devices were found.


Offline xenodius

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Re: I can't find a working tutorial that gets the wifi module installed.
« Reply #22 on: January 02, 2021, 05:56:19 PM »
I tried again and it told me write error and that there was no space left, when trying to move the files to optional, using v12.

I just setup wifi on v12 armv7l and aarch64, I'm on a pi4B but that shouldn't matter, and I had no problems copying the .tcz's just as described by polikou. I'd consider reflashing, maybe there's something leftover from following other guides? If that doesn't work, you should be able to mount a USB drive and copy them from there, just search for mounting usb I'm sure I've seen guides posted. Or you could use a usb->ethernet adapter, if you have ethernet available.
« Last Edit: January 02, 2021, 05:59:44 PM by xenodius »

Offline full-pixel

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Re: I can't find a working tutorial that gets the wifi module installed.
« Reply #23 on: January 03, 2021, 07:45:34 AM »
Yeah, I don't see how I'd be able to do well with usb mounting if I can't succeed doing anything else. Furthermore, doesn't learning the console  and mounting of usbs defeat even installing wifi and a gui at this point? My thread has an ironic goal if so. I could just install everything with the console via the usb. But then, it didn't work before so there's no reason to think it'd work then, so I gave/give up.  :'(

and no I rent wifi from a library, no ethernet, nor dongle either

Offline xenodius

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Re: I can't find a working tutorial that gets the wifi module installed.
« Reply #24 on: January 03, 2021, 01:53:29 PM »
Well, your hardware limits make it a bit harder than in most cases to setup wifi. But this only has to be done once. Tinycore is supposed to be as minimalist as possible. Once you setup wifi then you can simply read a copy of the whole image as backup and never have to use a usb drive to load .tcz's again. You can simply tce-load [opt] [package]...

The reason I suggested reflashing is because I had enough space to do what polikou described... so perhaps part of some other guide you followed is causing problems.

If there's no alternative but USB, first find out the name of the drive, in my case and probably yours it's 'sda1'. Use one of the following:
Code: [Select]
fdisk -l /dev/sda
fdisk -l /dev/sdb
which for me returns sda1:
Code: [Select]
Disk /dev/sda: 30 GB, 32015679488 bytes, 62530624 sectors
3892 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Device  Boot StartCHS    EndCHS        StartLBA     EndLBA    Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 *  0,0,33      1023,254,63         32   62530623   62530592 29.8G  7 HPFS/NTFS

Once you know the name you just have to:
Code: [Select]
# Mount drive:
mount /dev/sda1
# Copy files:
cd /mnt/mmcblk0p2/tce/optional
sudo cp /mnt/sda1/firmware-rpi-wifi.tcz .
sudo cp /mnt/sda1/wifi.tcz .
# Add to onboot:
echo "wifi.tcz" >> /mnt/mmcblk0p2/tce/onboot.lst
echo "firmware-rpi-wifi.tcz" >> /mnt/mmcblk0p2/tce/onboot.lst
# Restart:
sudo reboot
« Last Edit: January 03, 2021, 01:56:01 PM by xenodius »

Offline Greg Erskine

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Re: I can't find a working tutorial that gets the wifi module installed.
« Reply #25 on: January 03, 2021, 02:21:17 PM »
I think you need load firmware-rpi-wifi.tcz before wifi.tcz.

So you may need:

Code: [Select]
echo "firmware-rpi-wifi.tcz" >> /mnt/mmcblk0p2/tce/onboot.lst
echo "wifi.tcz" >> /mnt/mmcblk0p2/tce/onboot.lst