[K12OSN] Wireless card for ltsp

[ssanders at coin.org]

On Tue, 2006-10-03 at 16:49 +0530, Nataraj S Narayan wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Please suggest a Wireless NIC which will work with LTSP client. Is 
> Realtek OK?

As others mentioned, there's not enough bandwidth in a typical wifi
connection to work very well with more than a few clients. The worst
problem is (also as mentioned) you have to have a kernel of sorts
working first before you can get wifi working. There's not enough room
on a floppy for all this plus the basic etherboot info. There was a boot
floppy image for wifi, but it was only for Hermes I/Lucent/Orinoco
chipsets, and will not work with Realtek. I have one of those cards, and
experimented with it. For one client, it would work fairly well.

The easiest way to try this, is boot the machine to a Knoppix disc
FIRST. Once you get wifi/networking set up, you can then at a shell
prompt issue:

X -query server

This will give you a regular K12LTSP client login over wifi. If your
client is minimal, you may not want the full Knoppix using your RAM
additionally in the background. In that case, press F2 while the Knoppix
disc is booting, and enter  knoppix 2         That will start you in
single-user mode only. Enter     netcardconfig      and you can get your
wireless working like that, then start the connection to the K12LTSP
server. For minimal machines, Damn Small Linux can work well for that.