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Issues with WiFi Cards on Jornada 720

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fwilhelm Page Icon Posted 2021-02-28 2:10 PM
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Hi folks: I am a newbie to this site, joining after a few long years since I had a Jornada 720.

I am trying to get my J720 to connect to WiFi, but I am having issues with a few of the PC cards I have tried.

Cisco Aironet 340 (I also have a 350): drivers seem to load OK, and the applications seem to be working OK, but I think I am missing the configuration steps (it seems the Aironet software requires to configure a Profile with all sorts of options). Is there a "how to" do this out there?

Lucent Orinoco Gold card: I installed the software OK, but when I try to run the wireless utility, I get an error message "Driver Not Loaded".

Any clues on how to get one of these options to work out would be appreciated.

On a separate note, I wonder if there is a better/easier option for a WiFi PC card. Ideally, this would mean just plug and play.

Any suggestions are most welcomed.

Thanks!
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C:Amie Page Icon Posted 2021-02-28 5:14 PM
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Your wireless has to either be unencrypted or at most use WEP128 (not WPA or WPA2) in order to connect a 720 to WiFi. Most home access points are going to be running in WPA2 mode, so just won't work without lowering security.

The 350 is probably the easiest option. Just update the driver and if you have an external PC with a PCMCIA slot, the firmware too.
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joval Page Icon Posted 2021-02-28 6:12 PM
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Both are good wifi cards but limited to WEP...no longer considered secure, so using an old wep router as a home subnet is a common use.

Orinocco card requires the Agere/lucent driver which can be downloaded as a zip file contained the lucent.cab on this site. Choose Arm version.

The Aironet card driver is part of the stock rom on the J720 and configuration app is found Start => programs =>communication=> Aironet setup and Aironet WEP (password is "Aironet".

IMO, it's a bit of a dance to get wifi working. Go into settings=>control panel =>network. Pick the Aironet or lucent driver (WLAGS:Agere), open properties and set a static ip address, subnet, and router gateway, primary DNS is router address... (IMO static address works more consistently than DHCP).

Then programs=>communications=>remote networking=>make new connection=>name it=>direct connection=>next=>usb on comx=>tcpip settings=>set static ip=>set server (router) ip.

In control panel =>communication properties=>change device name to a specific ID on network=>PC connection=>change to your connection name from drop down menu.

Tweaks2k2 programs is great for setting up network file shares.

Some of the above may or may not be necessary and sound a bit like VooDoo....but it works well for me and you can waste hours trying to catch your tail. This way you have all the bases covered! Good luck.

Joval

posted from my J720 running Devuan + Raspi

Edited by joval 2021-02-28 6:19 PM
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fwilhelm Page Icon Posted 2021-03-01 3:11 PM
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Thanks all for comments. I have been able to get the Orinoco Gold card to work. The green light lights up, and I get the connection window to show up. However, the connection seems to get stuck at "Searching"...it does not find my Wifi network at home. It also does not find my iPhone hotspot connection.

Anyone that has a clue as to how to tweak this to make it work? Much appreciated!

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ntware Page Icon Posted 2021-03-01 3:25 PM
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C:Amie - 2021-02-28 12:14 PM

Your wireless has to either be unencrypted or at most use WEP128 (not WPA or WPA2) in order to connect a 720 to WiFi. Most home access points are going to be running in WPA2 mode, so just won't work without lowering security.


As C:Amie said, you won't be able to connect unless you "downgrade" your WiFi to at least WEP128, but honestly the best results with those old WiFi cards are usually with open networks, i.e. WiFi with no password at all.

Additionally, your WiFi network needs to be on b/g/n compatibility mode. This is for the wireless signal your router sends. If it is on g or n only, your Orinoco card won't even see the network, let alone connect to it.

As you probably guessed, this means that you can't connect to iPhone hotspots, which is a bummer, I know. Apple won't allow you to downgrade the security of your hotspot on the iPhone. I know that some older versions of Android did allow you to set a WiFi hotspot with no password, and that did work with my Jornada. I don't know about the newer versions though, as I moved to iPhone in 2017.

As for your home network, tweaking the security of it requires you to log in to your router and change configs. Each router vendor/model has a specific way of doing it, but usually it is quite intuitive. If you live in a mountain with no neighbors nearby, I would say that running an open WiFi network at home is no big deal. Otherwise, you might end up having neighbors connecting to your network if you don't set a password.

Finally, your best bet with WiFi cards on the Jornada is by using Linux instead of WinCE. There is an active thread here talking about running Devuan on the Jornada. If you're a bit tech savvy, this is a very nice thing to try. I have my Jornada running an up to date Debian variant, and with that I can connect to modern WiFi networks (WPA) with no problems.

Edited by ntware 2021-03-01 3:27 PM
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fwilhelm Page Icon Posted 2021-03-01 3:37 PM
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Thank you!

I am thinking of trying to get linux up and running on my Jornada. This an be a nice project. I'll look for instructions here (I am somewhat savvy, but can always use a step-by-step type of tutorial).

So, I assume drivers for linux are available for PC wifi cards?

Thanks again.
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ntware Page Icon Posted 2021-03-01 4:02 PM
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The "Linux on Jornada" thread is here: https://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=18740&po...

It is quite lenghty but has all info you'll ever gonna need on this topic. If you want a step-by-step tutorial to get started, Stephan's site is perfect: http://www.sp-net.at/wiki/doku.php?id=jornada_j720
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joval Page Icon Posted 2021-03-01 5:09 PM
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ntware - 2021-03-01 8:02 AM

The "Linux on Jornada" thread is here: https://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=18740&po...

It is quite lenghty but has all info you'll ever gonna need on this topic. If you want a step-by-step tutorial to get started, Stephan's site is perfect: http://www.sp-net.at/wiki/doku.php?id=jornada_j720


Agree... also you can use SD Card in place of CF cards and enlarge partition 1 (Fat16 or Fat32) to allow "dual boot of sorts" option. Then theres the wifi or ethernet VNC to RaspberryPi "hybrid" which gives you some real fire power and opens up the entire internet to the J720 and is completely portable (RasPi runs for many hours off cellphone charger/battery). Enjoy the journey/Jornada!

@ntware; how do you set up auto login and auto startxh/vnc etc
RasPi has autologin for example with VNC server running. Thanks in advance!

Joval
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fwilhelm Page Icon Posted 2021-03-01 6:43 PM
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Update: so now I am able to connect to a zero-security connection in my house. Yay!

However, the additional thing I am seeing now is that very few websites can actually be accessed; the old browser will not get to most sites.

This is definitely enough to try to get a more advanced OS (and browser) installed on these little wonder machines.
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ntware Page Icon Posted 2021-03-01 7:21 PM
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joval - 2021-03-01 12:09 PM
@ntware; how do you set up auto login and auto startxh/vnc etc
RasPi has autologin for example with VNC server running. Thanks in advance!
Joval

I didn't. I rather have the option to do something else if I want than being forced to boot into X+VNC all the time. Sometimes all I want to do is run some terminal commands for server maintenance, tests, etc. There is no point in booting all the way up to X for that. Especially because in my case, my VNC server is constantly running here at home, so all I have to do is type startx, wait for it to load, and then start Tiger VNC to connect.

But in any case, if you want to automatically start stuff, you can look at /etc/rc.local startup script. I'm linking here a Raspberry Pi documentation for that, but this should be valid for pretty much any Linux distribution out there (including Devuan): https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/linux/usage/rc-local.md
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ntware Page Icon Posted 2021-03-01 7:28 PM
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fwilhelm - 2021-03-01 1:43 PM

Update: so now I am able to connect to a zero-security connection in my house. Yay!

However, the additional thing I am seeing now is that very few websites can actually be accessed; the old browser will not get to most sites.

This is definitely enough to try to get a more advanced OS (and browser) installed on these little wonder machines.

Using the Jornada to browse the web is definitely a horrible idea. Not only WinCE built-in IE sucks, but also the Jornada itself is very low powered, making any website loading process into a monk patience test. And don't get excited about Linux either, as it will take several minutes just to open a modern browser on it. If you want to browse the web, your options are 1) Use WRP Proxy: https://github.com/tenox7/wrp or 2) Use VNC from Jornada Linux to connect to a more powerful box running somewhere else.
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fwilhelm Page Icon Posted 2021-03-01 9:22 PM
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Indeed, browsing on the J720 today is painfully slow, when you can actually get to the website you want to go to.

Just for fun, I tried loading hpcfactor.com! Not even close... :-(
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C:Amie Page Icon Posted 2021-03-02 10:35 AM
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I made the decision to move away from maintaining H/PC compatible code in 2010 so as to give the vast majority of visitors to the site a better user experience. I did keep a low-re theme going for a while from 2004, but pretty much no one used it and it simply doubles the maintenance work, so that was axed too.

No modern ECMA support, no AJAX, CSS, encryption, HTML5, codec support... It is no wonder that nothing works.
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joval Page Icon Posted 2021-03-03 5:42 PM
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fwilhelm - 2021-03-01 1:22 PM

Indeed, browsing on the J720 today is painfully slow, when you can actually get to the website you want to go to.

Just for fun, I tried loading hpcfactor.com! Not even close... :-(


Yes, the stock PIE browser is nearly useless except for practising writing /coding HTML 4.0 and CSS basics. using a text editor or better H-bomb app.

However, there is a very good/useful work around wherein using a laptop, etc you browse what you are interested in and (using "ctrl s" save as a "full webpage/complete web page" to an SD Card , then remove and place the SD card in your J720 using an SD card to (cheap)Pcmcia adapter. Then...

Download and install AIReader2 from HPCFactor download site( => software, =>Reader=>. Open the menu => open file=> storage card=>find your webpage.html file. It will load superfast and will render most images too. It's a very versatile program esp. once you learn the hot keys you can change the font size/bold on the fly, change to dark reverse background, and split the screen in two. Believe you me, you will enjoy reading wikipedia articles, or web tutorials, news, etc, offline with your cozy J720.

Lastly if you use a wifi+ SD storage card ( like the flashair or equivalent) in your J720 . You just map the drive on Your Laptop and when you save the webpage it shows up on the J720 SD card in seconds! (provided the J720 pcmcia slot is "awake" and the wifi part of the sdcard is turned on).

I know this may seem like TMI, but really you can view all sorts of webpages with pictures. (There isn't any javascript interactivity but then you're offline). Try it... you will like it and it will open up a wide arena for your J720 (running stock WinCE 3.0 ). (Seems it may run on some WinCE 2.11 MIPS HPC's too) Enjoy.

Joval

Edited by joval 2021-03-03 6:02 PM
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joval Page Icon Posted 2021-03-04 3:11 PM
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ntware - 2021-03-01 11:21 AM
There is no point in booting all the way up to X for that. Especially because in my case, my VNC server is constantly running here at home, so all I have to do is type startx, wait for it to load, and then start Tiger VNC to connect.


ntware: Thanks! OK now I see... using VNC viewer running on the Jornada (via port 5xxx) there is no need to ssh into the RasPi / Linux server. You still begin X system using the startx command on Jornada though (to set up the display access?), before running VNCviewer. Your way gives much faster display response and eliminates the two addition steps of logging into ssh and imputing password,etc.

In addition if VNC file transfer is set up, you can easily save webpages/files to the Jornada for offline viewing in WinCe (power saving advantage) mode.

Very good... very nice! Anyone else out there giving this a try????
Joval

Edited by joval 2021-03-04 3:37 PM
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