[K12OSN] wireless_ltsp. it works.

[ssanders at coin.org]

i had been interested in this for some time. i have an old laptop with
no HD, (Gateway solo, 300mhz/128meg) that is a little light on ram for
Knoppix (for KDE anyway, fluxbox is better). Damn Small Linux works
quite well on it, and i have been able to run VNC to my home/test LTSP
server and login as a regular LTSP user via wireless. the problem was
that the VNC window had lower res, wasn't quite big enough, and had to
scroll.

the readme for the wireless_ltsp says that it was developed around an
Orinoco/Lucent Silver card... hmm, i happen to have one of those. the
instructions were quite straightforward, once you are in the extracted
dir, dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=10240 produces a boot floppy.

as per the readme, i edited wireless.cfg and put my AP's ESSID, channel
and WEP key (my AP will do WPA, but this old card will not). the AP is
Lynksys WRT54g (a nice candidate for reflashing with the OpenWRT project
and running upgraded linux on, itself), but the old Orinoco/Lucent will
only do B (which is limited to 11mbit/sec).

it came right up, although it took longer than i am used to in the wired
clients. it took awhile at the line  Using config file:
"/tmp/XF86Config.1" while booting. i could see the card's activity light
was humming away, it came up to the normal X login screen. the USB mouse
that usually is detected in most Knoppix variants does not work, but
touchpad is OK. it works well, and the 1024 x 768 is nice for the laptop
LCD, and no scrolling. screen redraws are quite a bit slower and a lot
of wifi LTSP clients might be problematic, but it seems to be very
usable on one.

if you're getting NFS swap errors, you might
check /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/lts.conf and see if default is USE_NFS_SWAP=Y.
if it is on (and you need it) you might make an entry for the laptop
based on the MAC and turn it off for the laptop. 

since the README only mentions Orinoco/Lucent Silver (same as Gold, but
with lower encryption) and is a couple of  years old, that means that
the chipset of the cards is Hermes I. you can buy Orinoco Gold Classic
cards all day long on Ebay now, but the newer ones are made by Proxim
and are Hermes II chipset. i seriously doubt that it would work (Hermes
I and II are widely not clones in other applications). for a quick test,
i stuck in an SMC 2532W-B card i have here, a nice Prism chipset card
that is widely supported in Linux. it identifies the card correctly, but
dhclient fails with Kernel Panic (not talking over the wifi, it won't
get an IP). since most things Linux care more about chipset than
manufacturer, i would guess that any Hermes I wifi card might work.

in checking, it appears the latest is
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ltsp/wireless_ltsp-3.0.5-i386.tgz?
download still several years old, but it worked for me.