I just got a hold of a cool device that, unfortunately, I can't get working. It's a netpliance i-opener, that has been hacked like crazy. When I got it, it had a 6gb hard drive, rca jacls for speakers out (haven't tried using them though so they may not work), USB, keyboard and mouse jacks. The device has a 16mb Sandisk with Midori Linux on it. The hard drive is bootable with Win98se. Because the Win98se is so painfully slow on this device, I default it to boot from the midori linux imaged Sandisk, which automatically opens a console and Opera browser.
Everything seems to work great except the one thing I want this device for: internet. I purchased a FMI wireless 802.11b router/switch and a wireless USB adaptor from CompUSA. I replaced my LinkSys non-wireless router with the wireless router, and it seems to work great as I'm getting a network feed through to my PC.
But I can't seem to get the wireless USB adaptor that is hooked up to the iopener/midori device to work. The drivers that came with it are for windows devices. Although there are a couple of non-supported linux drivers on the CD (not mentioned in the docs), but those are for Mandrake and Redhat distros. I am a complete novice when it comes to Linux and networking, so I may have a device here that I can't use...
I plugged the USB adaptor into the iopener and started the thing up. Midori has a web-based configuration system it seems, with one of the options being to start the network communications. I click on that and it does something, and then a second or so later comes back and says that the network should be working now. It isn't.
Any advice? Unfortunately the wireless USB adaptor is not labelled with any specific brand name. Just CompUSA. I did some net research and it seems that if this isnt a 'prism' chip based device and is an 'atmel' chipped device then I'm out of luck. But if it is prism, as supposedly most 802.11b adaptors are, then midori has built-in driver for it.
Help!