SOLVED How do I share wifi internet with non-wifi machine?

[Jimbo]

LATER EDIT:  Skip all the rest, go to muungwanna's post about half-way through page 3.  You'll find my happy post straight after it.  His solution worked perfectly for me.

Hello,
I have looked through a number of threads, but can't seem to find a simple walk-through for what I want to do.  Here's my situation:

The only internet I have is through a mobile wifi device.  No wired connection.
My laptop, running fully-updated PCLOS, connects perfectly to the mobile wifi device.  We have internet!
The old desktop that I just set up with pclinuxos-lxde-2012.06 has no wifi card.  It does have an ethernet port.
I have a cat5 crossover cable.

Can I use the crossover cable to connect the desktop to the laptop and so access the internet?

Please make any walk-throughs super simple, because I am!
Thanks,
Jim

[jimwilk]

Jimbo,
I don't know if this would work with your desktop. I certainly haven't had reliable success with one of those USB wifi gadgets to link the desk top wirelessly to a router. How is your laptop connected? If I read your post correctly, perhaps the laptop is the mobile link itself, or do you have a router?

Using a different distro, I was able to use the USB gadget to connect to my router. But, that wasn't satisfactory for me as I just had to use PCLinuxOS. So, I gave up and connected the desktop via a network cable through the wall. End of problem.

Jim

[aguila]

As it's a desktop, I would just go for an internal card, no fiddling with USB devices (or drilling holes).... The prices are really moderate (below 20 USD), and your headache's gone. Why make it complicated when it can be easy?

Just my 2 cts

[ppiklapp]

Unless you old machine is from the late eighties, (even some of them you still could pull a plug and play) the wireless card will be the way.  Unless your laptop is gear to be a hub, the signal will not be relayed from the laptop  to the wireless router.  The only other solution would be to replace the router with one that accepts wired connection.

[Jimbo]

Sorry, seems I wasn't clear in my original post.

My mobile wifi thingy is NOT a usb anything.  If it was, I could probably use it on the desktop.  

It's a little gadget with its own battery that sits on my desk, or in my pocket, or wherever, and magically connects with the Vodafone network, then broadcasts its own wifi signal that my laptop picks up.  Voila! internet (but only for the laptop).

What I now want to do is connect the laptop and the desktop using my crossover cable, and have the desktop access the internet via the laptop.

Now:  Vodafone network connects to wifi gadget connects to laptop NO CONNECTION to desktop.
I want:  Vodafone network connects to wifi gadget connects to laptop connects (via crossover cable) to desktop.

Money is very tight, so even spending $20 is not an option.

Thanks again.  Hope this clarifies matters a bit.

[aguila]

Maybe 5$ for a used one?

Otherwise, if the wireless router (I guess that's what you call it, might be a Huawei product) doesn't have an option to connect a cable, I wouldn't know how to do that. If you find a wireless router you could use as a repeater, you might connect the desktop to that one.

EDIT: and if you asked Vodafone to give you a router with Ethernet ports?

[Jimbo]

Perhaps I should look for a way of making the desktop wifi-enabled.  I see that Ebay Australia has these things:
Mini USB 802.11b/g/n 300Mbps WiFi N Wireless Adapter Dongle Network LAN Card  http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Mini-USB-802-11b-g-n-300Mbps-WiFi-N-Wireless-Adapter-Dongle-Network-LAN-Card-/180857119047?pt=AU_Components&hash=item2a1beca147
Does this seem like it would connect to a normal wifi, like the laptop does?

[muungwana]

can your two computer see each other through the cable?

you can share internet with other computers on your network by going to pcc->network and internet->share the internet connection with other local machines.

[Jimbo]

Muungwana,
Sorry, that's step one that I need help with.  How do I connect two PCLOS computers through a crossover cable?

[muungwana]

you connect one end of the ethernet wire to one computer ethernet port,you connect the other end of the ethernet cable to the other computer ethernet port.

you open the terminal on one computer,ping the other computer to see if you can reach it.

just run "ping -c 1 XYZ" where XYZ is the other computer IP address.The output of ping will tell you if you can reach the other computer or not.

How do you know the cable is a crossover cable?

[Jimbo]

How do you know the cable is a crossover cable?

That's what the boffins at work told me when they gave it to me a few years ago.  Frantically looking around now to find it and try what you suggested.

[Jimbo]

Sorry, I've not done any networking before.  Found crossover cable and connected both machines - how do I find out what each machine's IP address is?

[muungwana]

When you found it,look for the green wire line at both ends of the cable,if the green line is somewhere at the middle of both ends,then it is not.

the IP address should be included in the output of the following command

ifconfig

the "inet addr" line holds all relevant network information.

[Jimbo]

Results of laptop pinging desktop are:

[us@localhost ~]$ ping -c 1 169.254.140.128
PING 169.254.140.128 (169.254.140.128) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 169.254.140.128: icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.693 ms

--- 169.254.140.128 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.693/0.693/0.693/0.000 ms

Now what do I do?

[muungwana]

traffic was sent and received successfully,the link works.

Now to to pcc as i mentioned above and try to set it up,i cant give a step by step instructions as i dont have two computers to test but the steps are pretty simple,just follow them and ask when when you are stuck.