[wplug] Wireless Card in Linux

[Alexandros Papadopoulos]

On Monday 12 July 2004 18:14, abhishek soni wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
>
> I have a Toshiba Satellite 2430 S-255 notebook and I am pretty happy
> with the Fedora Core 2 install on it. I recently purchased the
> Netgear 802.11 g wireless card WG511T. In Linux, it recognises the
> card because when I do a "dmesg" it gives all of the card parameters
> correctly. Also the Wi-Fi monitor detects the device and the Atheros
> chipset on which this card is based. Unfortunately I do not know how
> to get this card activated, i.e. how to make it recognise that there
> is a wireless router at home.

Although I'm sure RedHat has something like Tools->Network->Configure 
Network Devices (or something to that effect), I'm a Debian user, hence 
all about old school. :-P

Therefore, you can do the following generic stuff that works on any 
distribution:

# iwconfig
This will show the status of all activated wireless devices. If you only 
get "no wireless extentions" for devices listed, then the module 
(driver) for your card has not been loaded. Google for your card type 
and figure out what module it needs. Mine needs the orinoco module, so 
with a 
# modprobe orinoco_pci
it's recognized by the system as a network interface and ready to be 
used.

# ifconfig -a
This will show you your network devices. I expect your wireless card to 
be recognized as wlan0 or eth1

Then, depending on whether you get a dynamic (DHCP) address from your 
router or you always have a static address, you have to configure the 
interface (wlan0 or eth1). The RH menus should be fine for this job, 
somewhere under "network device configuration" if I remember correctly, 
otherwise hand-editing /etc/sysconfig files gets too confusing.

Then all you have to do is assign the default route to your router with
# route add default gw IP.ADDRESS.OF.ROUTER

and put something proper in /etc/resolv.conf for name resolution. But 
FC2 might do that automatically for you, check out the GUI tools before 
messing about with configuration files.

HTH

-A