Catch 22: Need Wifi but no driver binary or base-devel

[devacc12]

Any ideas anyone?
The problem scenario:
There's no ethernet connection available to the Pi so I must use Wifi.
I have an Edimax EW-7811Un USB WiFi adapter based on the 8192cu.ko driver, for which I understand the drives are not in the standard Archlinux build (05Jul2012) so I must make from the source (from Edimax).
The problem is as there's no Internet to the Pi I can't use pacman to install the base-devel group to make the driver, (the files to make with are downloadable from Edimax support).
Seems like a catch 22 situation, no Internet to the Pi as no Wifi, but cannot install the package to make the driver.
Also will I need other packages (e.g. wpa-supplicant) to get the wifi working?

Thanks for any advice.
Related posts:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=112790
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=116527

[falker]

Download all packages in base-devel to a flash drive.
Perhaps try this on a connected device (same architecture): pacman -Scc , pacman -S -w base-devel and copy over /var/lib/pacman/local to the flash.

[Philoo]

well, there could be a couple things you can with the help of some additional hardware:

- if you've a computer with both an ethernet and wifi adapter (read a laptop or a desktop with a wifi adapter) you could bridge your wifi connection to the ethernet and feed your Rpi from it. Your mileage will vary depending on the OS. Mac OS is pretty much straight forward, windows can be a little bit involved, linux is not that hard but you need to have some not-so-basic understanding on how networking works on your distro of choice. Ask google for "internet connection sharing"

- QEMU: you can use qemu-system-arm to run a virtual armv6 system on a linux PC. it is an approximate match, it is slow but this is with a really minimal footprint. and yes you can use attach the SD card to a virtual qemu drive. just keep it simple and have the sd card inserted when starting the VM, wait until the VM is shutdown to remove it. Qemu does not do well with hot unplug. google will oblige if you ask it for raspberry Pi and qemu.

- some cheap "travel" wifi routers will also work as wifi client and do the bridging as described in first option.example TP-link 700 or 703, MR3020. there are other brands who do that. That's probably what I would do, if 30-50 bucks + delivery/pickup time is not a constraint.

- actually what I would do would be to use my kirwood based QNAP: plug the sd card to usb (with an adapter). ssh to the device in stock firmware, from there chroot to the sd card.

- along that line if you have another device on archlinuxarm using the armv5 repository (dockstar, pogoplug etc) you can also install the packages you need on said device then copy the pacman cache directory to your sd card and install the "cached" packages. Sharing pacman's cache is actually one of the most (if not THE most) efficient package download acceleration if you own several devices with the same architecture. Ask the archlinux wiki.

HTH

*edits* typos

[pepedog]

What device id does it have, lsusb.py
Is it 7392:7811 which is discussed here viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1129&p=6311&hilit=edimax#p6311

[devacc12]

Thanks for the replies: falker,Philoo, pepedog.

I'll get to work on them and report back on as many as I can. In the meantime device ID is 7392:7811.

[devacc12]

After wasting most of the day on this I've concluded that connecting via Ethernet is the best solution. Perhaps others with better skills can do better with a local repository.

Notes of the method I used:
Creating a network bridge: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... ork-bridge
Essentially: Start, Control Panel, Network and Internet, Network Connections. Choose the network connections, in my case WiFi (to internet) and the Ethernet port, right click, choose Bridge. A Bridge icon should appear in windows.

In my case the Pi dhcp kicked into life immediately and so I was able to use pacman.

I updated all packages first: pacman -Syu, it took several minutes.
After the Edimax WiFi was correctly identified by lsusb.

My problem is now that although the device is shown in lsusb there still is no wlan0 device.
I'm trying to figure out how to move on to get it created now.

[Philoo]

I guess now this https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wireless_Setup will be helpful to you.

[pepedog]

Want to try this first?
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'cd /lib/modules/extramodules-3.1.9--raspberrypi
wget http://myplugbox.com/8192cu.ko
depmod -a')
You have to blacklist the rtl version before reboot and modprobe 8192cu
I don't have the hardware, but the module loads fine
I compiled myself
Hope you know how to configure (in their docs)

[alexchamberlain]

I've just written a guide to installing packages on a mounted image on Raspberry Pi.SE. It's essentially the QEMU method.