Re: [NTLK] inetnet connectivity

   Woody,

   Thanks for the reply. And thanks to everyone else who replied as well.
As is always the case with software and newbies, I ran into numerous
problems which I didn't know how to resolve. I didn't even know what were
the underlying causes - which makes resolving each problem most difficult.

   However, the newton is now connected and useful. Here are some of the
amazing things I've discovered in the last two days of futzing with this
thing:

  * The Wavelan Bronze Turbo doesn't like to talk with my WTRG54G V5
Linksys router. It will bind to my tenant's wireless linksys router
(version unknown) upstairs though. No idea why. The connect light just
turns off - it doesn't even get to requesting a dhcp lease - which
suggests some incompatibility in the physical layer.

  * Escale OSX keeps crashing after every package installation. Further,
if I choose appletalk as the transmission protocol, I run the risk of
creating an unkillable process. Not even kill -9 takes it out. Should have
noted the process state from ps - sorry.

  * I was never able to get Escale or NCU under classic to talk with my
newton over serial. And it turned out that there was more than one serial
communication problem - untangling it all took work. For example, I had a
palm usb->serial converter left over from an old palm IIIe I have. Didn't
work for the newton because palm never provided a real driver for Macos X.
They just wrote their own connection utility. So I had to go buy another
one. But I still couldn't install packages from OS X. Dunno why. So I had
to boot into MacOS 9.22 and run NCU from there. Once I got the network
drivers and inet utilities installed I've been able to perform TCP
installations using escale and the tcp dock module.

       * Which brings up another issue: I had to *really* dig to discover
that the Newton serial device defaults to 38.4 kbps. That turned out to be
pretty important because I was wasting time trying every speed setting
with and without a null modem cable. Also: Hey, one needs a null modem
cable! That's useful to know too. (One might say: *duh* of course it needs
a null modem cable! But I've seen plenty of devices that take straight
through serial and swap tx/rx pins internally). Ya never know.

   * Finally, it turned out that the seller didn't include internet setup
utilities on any of the flash cards. So I had network drivers, but no way
to set up tcp/ip. I assume he only used appletalk or serial connectivity.
Or, perhaps, he forgot.

   * Further, there was some kind of db corruption that finally forced me
to wipe the 2100 completely and start from scratch. Once I did that and
bootstrapped network drivers, etc, the newton started working much better.

   * Situation right now: I bought a 1gb cf card and pcmcia tray. It
works. I've bought the license and notified the author of the specific
card and tray to update his compatibility db. I've also contacted the
author of newt's cape to see if he's still accepting registrations too.
And I'm d/ling newton books. lots of newton books. :)

Thanks to everyone for their help and suggestions,
--M

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