I have an old IBM thinkpad 600E that i am trying to rescue (currently running Solaris 9 on it) to use as a BeOS/Haiku box.
My trouble is that it doesn’t have an ethernet port, so I was wondering if there were drivers available for ethernet or wifi pcmcia cards in BeOS or Haiku?
I once ported the linux 3com megahertz driver to BONE using the xircom one as base, but never finished… it worked but KDLed on ifconfig down. But the sources are around if needed.
Your best bet is to sign up to haiku’s trac and describe how its not working for you, and nag them every fortnight 'til they reply, or that is if someone doesn’t reply here .
There was a GPL-licensed Broadcom 44xx driver in the Haiku repository, which I used successfully on several occasions. The only issue was you had to enable gpl addons when configuring the haiku build environment (something which the public versions on haiku-files.org likely do not have).
Haiku has bcm440x driver. It’s GPL & not built by default. I’m not sure why. A question for the developers to answer. This driver would likely work with your network card.
I just downloaded the pre-alpha and was looking at the network drivers. The pre-alpha image came with 14 network drivers but in the repository I see 23 ( two for broadcom 570 ).
dp83815 supports a couple of cards, netgear FA-311/312 for example, but is buggy and untested, vlance just absolutely sucks, several others are older versions that have been superseded by newly ported freebsd drivers (thus why you see multiple drivers for the same cards), but they’re useful to keep around in case someone wants to compile them for R5 or Zeta still (where the freebsd compat layer won’t work).
Generally, anything not in the image is likely not well tested, or known to be broken.
The reason the GPL drivers are not built by default is due to licensing issues. The speculation is that by distributing GPL drivers to the general public with haiku, it will force those versions of Haiku to be provided as GPL-licensed code as well. I personally don’t believe that’s necessarily true, but since there’s so much controversy over what definitions of “linking” and “derivatives” are when it comes with GPL, I guess it was just safer to not distribute those drivers WITH Haiku by default. Persons wishing to compile them into their own Haiku builds, or provide the drivers as separately-compiled binaries may do so.
Thanks for the reply Urias. I thought/guessed the same but wanted to be sure this was right.
Urias wrote:
“Generally, anything not in the image is likely not well tested, or known to be broken.”
Or GPL drivers
I thought GPL code in the driver source would only make the driver GPL. For instance, say Haiku had 1 GPL network driver and the rest of Haiku’s code was Non-GPL. Then only that network driver would fall under GPL license. That’s the way I personally see it.
But I understand what you’ve said. That 1 GPL driver could be considered a part of Haiku itself ( not separate from the OS ) and force all of Haiku to become GPL. Tough call, hard to say which would be right.
In any case, someone should go through, compile the GPL drivers and upload them to a site like Haikuware. Can’t expect normal users to download the source and compile it themselves just to obtain a missing driver.
I have an rtl8139 based card in my ThinkPad 600E that I use for random software development. It is also running Haiku, but I was under the impression that PCMCIA wasn’t supported anyway?
My & Urias’ comments were meant for Papa with the AcerTravelmate 2493WLMi.
Laptops with integrated ethernet, like Papa’s Travelmate should work with a Haiku supported driver. Only way to get internet on laptops for now - buy one with Haiku supported, integrated ethernet chip.
PCMCIA is not available for Haiku. So, add-in cards will not work.
So, I built Haiku with “INCLUDE_GPL_ADDONS = 1 ;”.But get same as with driver from bebits.com - card are initialized, but don`t work.On OpenBSD card works well.
What is your vendor & device ids for the network card? - use listdev in Haiku
cd into /dev/net & list folders & subfolders
In Network preferences can you select the network card?
what information does ifconfig give for the card?
Do you use a router? If so, assign the network card a static ip and ping the router.
With my computer my router does not work with DHCP and I have to use static ip in Haiku for networking to work.
Either, the driver is not loading for ( or recognizing/supporting ) your network card or your card is not being configured properly ( ie: can happen if you use DHCP ).
This is a good example of someone ( cssvb94 ) having issues with the old broadcom driver. He reports it as a bug. Developer ( Korli ) then ports over the current BSD broadcom440x driver. And now networking works for you. http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/2998
Actually with Haiku’s FreeBSD network layer it should allow wired network cards that work with BSD to be easily ported and work with Haiku.
Not sure when this will become available. Eventually Haiku will also get pcmcia support later on but you’d still require separate network driver for the cards.
cd into /dev/net & list folders & subfolders:
There is not folder/subfolder in /dev/net
In Network preferences can you select the network card?
No network card shown.
what information does ifconfig give for the card?:
I typed ifconfig in the terminal and got:
MTU: 16384 others are: inet addr: 127.0.0.1 Mask: 255.0.0.0 and Metric: 0 up loopback link…
by receive: the value is all: 0
Do you use a router? If so, assign the network card a static ip and ping the router:
How to do this? Cannot choose the card in the network preferences.
Which is more likely to work?
The Wireless or the Ethernet card?