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| Villanova | Villanova Engineering | Mechanical Engineering | |
Wireless and Linux
If trying to get wireless cards to work in Linux, there's some decent help out there, but I found some of it a bit too technical, so here's a more or less easy way that I got my wireless card to work running SUSE Linux 9.3.
The driver
The hardest part was getting the driver. Since most wireless card manufacturers (lame) do not bother to make Linux drivers, you either need a driver someone has written, which is hard to find, or some sort of patch for a Windows driver. I came across a company called Linuxant that sells a patch for Windows XP wireless driver. The list of supported hardware is listed on the previous link. Yes, you have to pay for it, but given that it works well and you can download a 30 day free trial to make sure it work on your system, and it's only twenty bucks, it's a small price to pay for wireless.
So once you download the driver, they have this great browser based setup tool which essentially guides you through the setup process. The key is directing the Linuxant patch to the appropriate driver. If you are dual booting Linux and Windows, this is great as you can access the Windows XP wireless driver on your Windows partition. For me, I have a Broadcom 1450 PCI Wireless adapter and it was located in C:\DELL\drivers\R94827\bcmwl5.inf. Otherwise, you'll have to get the driver from either the XP CD or a vendor CD.
Once you finish the setup with the Linuxant tool, you are most of the way there. The setup tool automatically configured the wireless card and set it up as interface 'wlan0'
Configuration
Now the driver is set up properly, your system just needs to be configured to start the interface wlan0 when the '/etc/init.d/network start' is invoked. Go to the directory '/etc/sysconfig/network', this is where some important configuration information for your wired and wireless network connections is stored. There should be a file called 'ifcfg-wlan0' or something like that. Open up this file as root. My file seems to work and it has these 5 lines in it:
BOOTPROTO='dhcp'
DHCLIENT_MODIFY_RESOLV_CONF='yes'
DHCLIENT_SET_DEFAULT_ROUTE='yes'
HWD_DRIVER='hostap_driverloader'
STARTMODE='auto'
For me, they key change form he default was setting STARTMODE to 'auto'. You may want to save the file with a different name before making changes. Once these changes were made, I restarted my network: '/etc/init.d/network restart' and everything worked like a charm. Most likely when your system boots, this network script is run, so your wireless will be automatically started when you boot. If not, check your boot instructions.
Management
There are several available tools for identifying and connecting to available networks. I haven't tried connecting to an encrypted network, so I don't know how it works. I have used 'kwifimanager' to view available networks and connection strength.
Success
If you have used these instructions and they worked for either a SuSe system or other Linux distribution, please let me know. If you had to make minor adjustments, or have any suggestions for improvements, please let me know. I hope this saves you some of the headaches that I had. It seems so simple in retrospect...