[Fedora-livecd-list] wireless and liveCD

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2006-12-28 at 10:05 +0100, Tony Grant wrote:
> I have been reading the list but not working on my liveCD because my
> machine died. One issue that I have with Fedora is the impossibility of
> using ndiswrapper to load Windows drivers for unsupported WiFi chipsets.
> 
> I have a very nice $2 on ebay Linksys WUSB11v.4 adaptor that caused me
> much jumping though very large hoops to get working because of the 4K
> stack issue: 
> http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Fedora 
> I followed the instructions there to download a precompiled Fedora 6 kernel
> 
> It appears to be pretty much impossible to build a liveCD that uses a
> wireless connection which is a shame because many of the aDSL bundles
> available now have a WiFi enabled box.

The live cd tools easily support if people wants to do this... Just
build your own live cd and add 

     --repo=livna,http://address.of.livna.repo/find_it_yourself
     --package=kmod-ndiswrapper

See [1] for options. You can also use the --base-on option, then
something along the lines of

 # livecd-creator --base-on=FC-6-i386-livecd-1.iso
     --fs-label=This-Is-Not-An-Offical-Fedora-6-LiveCD
     --repo=livna,http://address.of.livna.repo/find_it_yourself
     --package=kmod-ndiswrapper

should do the trick. 

Rahul already explained why we cannot include this software on the live
CD; it's really no different from why we can't include it in Fedora. And
that's also one reason you probably can't call such a live cd "Fedora".
But, sure, you can include all the Forbidden Items on a live cd if you
want; how well it works is for your self and possibly others to find
out. [2]

     David

[1] : 
[davidz at hook ~]$ livecd-creator 
No packages specified.

usage: livecd-creator [--help] 
                      [--repo=<name1>,<url1> ...] [--repo=<name2>,<url2>]
                      --package=<p1> [--package=<p2> ...]
                      [--exclude-package=<e1>] --exclude-package=<e2> ...]
                      [--base-on=<path-to-iso-file>]
                      [--fslabel=<label>]

 --help             : Print usage and exit
 --repo             : Path to yum repository
 --package          : Include this package
 --exclude-package  : Exclude this package
 --base-on          : Add packages to an existing live CD iso9660 image
 --fslabel          : File system label (default: livecd-YYYYMMDD-HHMI)

[2] : Just for kicks I tried, to test that this really works, to include
the ATI graphics driver and it doesn't work well on the live cd as it
relies on the user manually having to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.
In contrast the free video drivers from X.org have moved beyond this.
Make up your own mind.