Best Wireless Card?

[Favrenation]

Hi I have a PCMCIA Linksys WPC11 V4 card and I can't get it to work on my tiny core hard drive install. I can't even get wcid to load even though I downloaded all of the dependencies. It says something about can't find gobject. I was wondering what usb or pcmcia card would work a lot easiar in tiny core?

[maro]

Well, wireless cards can be a bit problematic to get them working for the first time. And IMHO using a GUI tool like 'wicd' does not help much when problems with the hardware arise.

OTOH I'd imagine that your card can be made to work with TC. According to this page your card should be supported by a kernel module contained in the 'wireless-2.6.33.3-tinycore.tcz' (or the newer 'compat-wireless-2.6.33.3-tinycore.tcz') extension.

To troubleshoot I suggest (again as I did here) to go step-by-step using just a few commands (and without installing 'wicd' and it's looooong list of dependencies):
(1) Pay good attention to the dmesg output. In my view the best way is to first take a snapshot (e.g. via dmesg > dmesg-01.log), then install the required extension (e.g. via tce-load -wi wireless-$(uname -r)), insert your cardbus wireless adaptor and take another 'dmesg' snapshot and compare the snapshots (e.g. via dmesg > dmesg-02.log ; diff -U 0 dmesg-01.log dmesg-02.log). You might want to share that result with us here.
(2) Make sure that the 'iwconfig' tool is available (e.g. via tce-load -wi wireless_tools) and check what device name is assigned to your wireless device (e.g. via iwconfig). Again you might want to share that result here.
(3) Now activate the device (e.g. via sudo ifconfig wlan0 up) and take another 'dmesg' snapshot (e.g. via dmesg > dmesg-03.log ; diff -U 0 dmesg-02.log dmesg-03.log). This activation step is likely to result in a failure, if the device requires some firmware file (which might be available from the 'firmware.tcz' extension). But the 'dmesg' output should contain an appropriate message if this is the case. BTW, the 'ifconfig' command on it's own will only show active adaptors, but adding either the '-a' parameter to list all that are available, or specifying the interface name should overcome this minor obstacle.

If you get to the point that the interface is "UP" all the rest depends on your WiFi setup (e.g. WEP or WPA). Which is then something that can be either addressed with the help of some GUI tools (e.g. 'wicd') or some rather simple commands that could be put into a custom script. But I don't want to jump too far ahead as this is so far the first hurdle that needs to be navigated.