(Having re-read this I realise this it could be misinterpreted as a rant (which is not intended) and that it end up asking more than one question (which is not ideal) but it seems to be the best way to handle my confusion. I have trawled the forums but the posts that I found were not able to educate me...).
OK Here goes. I first used TinyCore about a week ago under version 2. Wireless was simple. Having acquired the relevant extentions the kernel automatically loaded:
wl, lib80211_crypt_tkip and lib80211. One of these created a new interface
eth1. I simply added wicd-start to bootlocal.sh and then wicd-gtk was able to do the rest. The entire process took a few minutes (thanks partly to TCs wonderfully fast boot!
) and worked first time. For my 6 days of TC2 it was great.
Now that I've moved to TC3 (which seems mostly great by the way) wireless has 'broken'... wl, lib80211_crypt_tkip and lib80211 are no longer loaded, instead being replaced by
b43,cfg80211 and mac80211. One of these has created a wlan0 interface but ifconfig cannot bring the interface up (presumably because of missing firmware - noted below). Adding wl, lib80211_crypt_tkip and lib80211 no longer produces eth1 however dmesg informs me that wl has 'tainted' the kernel and that b43 requires firmware to be cut from other sources.
So; the actual questions:
1. What has actually happenned here and why? If wl etc was working why has b43 appeared to break things?
2. It appears that I have a choice of using wl or b43. Which is correct/preferred/recommended?
3. I've heard of blacklisting modules but I've never had to do so before. With TCs extention system should I be adding /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf to my .filetool.lst or should it be included as a .tcz extention in its own right? I also noticed a blacklist= bootcode mentioned in the TC3 announcement. Is this the preferred method?
(btw; blacklist= doesn't seem to be in the bootcodes faq. Might be worth adding that?).
Thanks in advance, Richard