Posts like this one are the reason why I started this blog. This is a reminder of how I connect to a wireless network from the Crux live CD. This is on a Thinkpad 1100 iSeries using a WPC11 wireless card. Necessary modules are listed here, as part of the setup. It’s possible your old laptop and card use the same modules but that’s for you to determine.

1. Boot a Crux 2.4 CD.
2. modprobe yenta-socket
3. modprobe orinoco-cs
4. mkdir -p /var/lib/pkg
5. touch /var/lib/pkg/db
6. pkgadd /cdrom/crux/opt/wireless-tools#29-1.pkg.tar.gz
7. Now comes the oddball part. pcmciautils isn’t included as part of the Crux CD, and it’s in the contrib repo, so it has to be built elsewhere and copied onto the target machine. This one is precompiled for --march=pentium3. Install it with pkgadd and continue.
8. pcmcia-socket-startup
9. iwconfig eth0 mode managed essid any
10. ifconfig eth0 up
11. dhcpcd eth0

From there, it should be working. Test it with ping http://www.google.com, after …

pkgadd /cdrom/crux/core/iputils#ss021109-try-4.pkg.tar.gz

I apologize if this information is so completely esoteric as to be useless to you; I promise more interesting content tomorrow. 😕