I rewrote a fresh flash drive of openwrt and tried the instructions again. I went into another part of luci to turn off a DHCP serving feature. I tried the ping ff command and it worked for a while, maybe about 50 lines then Debian said connection failed and then repeated "cannot assign requested address" in the terminal. Never did I see an ip address.
disconnected the Ethernet cable and reconnected. It is showing results again even though Debian desktop is showing Wired connecting...Then it eventually said wired off and the results in the terminal return to "cannot assign requested address".
I seem to be bumping up against a posting limit on this forum so I will try editing previous messages to keep the hope alive.
I do have keyboard and monitor connected to the nuc. The output of ip address show on the nuc while connected to Debian laptop via Ethernet.
the output from ping command on debian
I got the ip address of the nuc while connected to internet! I can now access luci from phone connected to landlords wifi. Now I need to know what to do to activate and use the wifi card in the nuc.
In Luci - software I clicked update lists and chose to install kmod-ath9k and associated files. After install I rebooted the nuc and there are no new wireless devices showing in the network - interfaces section...the software seems to be installed. Does it need further attention to activate it upon boot? I am unsure how to get the wifi portion working.
The nuc has been restarted more than once since installing kmod-ath9k. Not sure what is required to make the wifi work.
Ok, I installed the items mentioned by mk24 but the "etc" is unknown to me. I had no idea that those items were needed and certainly don't know what "etc" would be. I am currently looking here[[https://www.linux.com/training-tutorials/linux-wireless-networking-short-walk/] for items that might be necessary. I don't find nl80211 and cfg80211 is showing as kmod-cfg80211? Or is that something else? Just wandering around in the dark...
I see that iw-full was installed at some point. That includes iw and can function ok as is? When attempting to install wpad-mesh-wolfssl:
I get this:
...and what is the process for "recompiling openwrt with that build time option set"? Is that likely going to take many hours to understand and accomplish?
May thanks to the Linux experts who have helped me and others. 🙋😊