A few years ago, I experimented with wifi dongles on Dockstar to access wifi networks successfully. But that was Lenny time. Recently, I tried to do the same thing on Wheezy/Dockstar and Pogo Mobile, but always had problems. I used exactly the same procedure/configurations that had been used on Raspberry Pi successfully. However, they did not work on Dockstar and Pogo Mobile, even though all of them using Debian/Wheezy and based on arm processors as CPU.
The main issue I had was that the wifi network would connect and I could login through the wifi dongle's address with the ethernet cable plugged in, it would disconnect once I pulled out the ethernet cable. Then I found that if I disabled eth0 by "ifdown eth0," the wifi ip address will still work after unplugging the ethernet cable. So I added "ifdown eth0" to rc.local before exit. Sure enough, I can restart the device with the ethernet cable unplugged and the wifi still works.
After that I found another problem. Even though the device could reach other devices on the local net, it couldn't ping entities on internet outside local net. By checking using "route -n", I found the the gateway was reset after doing "ifdown eth0". It would work again if I did a "route add default gw 192.169.x.x(Gatewayip)", so I added this line to rc.local also.
Everything works fine now. However, I found another strange thing, even though that does not affect the functionality. When I check the available ip addresses by using Advanced IP Scanner, I can see that the ip address of the ethernet port still showed up and I can ssh in using that ip, even though "ifconfig" showed only lo and wlan0 but no eth0.
Since the same setup works fine on RPi, I suspect the behavior described above is caused by the Kernel (3.14.0-kirkwood-tld-1) used in Pogo Mobile/Dockstar. I am not really that good on Linux and networking. Maybe somebody more experience can find the cause of these behaviors, so wifi can work without the patches?
The main issue I had was that the wifi network would connect and I could login through the wifi dongle's address with the ethernet cable plugged in, it would disconnect once I pulled out the ethernet cable. Then I found that if I disabled eth0 by "ifdown eth0," the wifi ip address will still work after unplugging the ethernet cable. So I added "ifdown eth0" to rc.local before exit. Sure enough, I can restart the device with the ethernet cable unplugged and the wifi still works.
After that I found another problem. Even though the device could reach other devices on the local net, it couldn't ping entities on internet outside local net. By checking using "route -n", I found the the gateway was reset after doing "ifdown eth0". It would work again if I did a "route add default gw 192.169.x.x(Gatewayip)", so I added this line to rc.local also.
Everything works fine now. However, I found another strange thing, even though that does not affect the functionality. When I check the available ip addresses by using Advanced IP Scanner, I can see that the ip address of the ethernet port still showed up and I can ssh in using that ip, even though "ifconfig" showed only lo and wlan0 but no eth0.
Since the same setup works fine on RPi, I suspect the behavior described above is caused by the Kernel (3.14.0-kirkwood-tld-1) used in Pogo Mobile/Dockstar. I am not really that good on Linux and networking. Maybe somebody more experience can find the cause of these behaviors, so wifi can work without the patches?