# Wireless advice needed

## dbeer

Hi All,

I need some advice on Wireless cards.

My problem is as follows:

I am in a rented house so can not install any cables. One of the other guys has got broadband installed and a seperate modem which connects to his computer via a 10/100MB cable. I want o change this and connect to a wireles hub which is not a problem and the connect the hub to his pc. My problem is that i have a laptop and a pc, i mainly use the pc. I wondered how easy it is to setup and configure either a wireless pci card on my machine or to configure a PCMCIA card on the laptop, using gentoo of course.

I only have the internet at work so this may casue a few problems.

I would realy like some advice on this one and any hardware models and manufactures which make it easier to setup with. 

I have one widows based partion on both machines running either 2k or xp. I mainly use gentoo or a linux distribution so i am really after advice on which to get that wil be compatible with linux and the easist to install and setup.

Anything which goes in the pc has to be compatible when i upgrade.

Thanks in advance.

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## aderby

I've just bought 2 wireless PCI cards for my desktop machines and whilst the install process is not that much harder than any other device, things are still at an imature stage and the documentation also isn't great (unusually for Gentoo).  That said the bit I found hardest was tracking down a card that a) I knew was supported natively under linux b) was actually available to purchase in the UK.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/ - This seems to be the most comprehensive page on the status of wireless support in Linux.

After quite a few hours trawling the web this was the conclusion I came to -

There are basically 2 major viable driver efforts (there are others but I discounted them due to the fact that they where either for older hardware you can no longer purchase or didn't seem to be that active, oh yes there is also ndis wrapper that uses the windows driver but that just feels plain wrong)

The Madwifi drivers - http://sourceforge.net/projects/madwifi/

The Ralink drivers - http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page#Latest%20News

Of the two the madwifi stuff appears to be the more stable but I couldn't find any cards that I could be certain contained the right chipset.  Of the cards I could find that could contain the appropriate chipset also used incompatible chips without changing the model number, so buying one would have been a gamble.

I ended up buying a Ralink based card, but it wasn't easy to track one down, I used this page - http://ralink.rapla.net/ and ended up buying a Kcorplifestyle 54g PCI Desktop Adapter Generation II (Model KLS-660).  The Ralink driver has at least one known issue - it really doesn't like smp kernels but I'm not using one so not an issue for me.  I'm running it just in basic managed mode with no WEP and it appears stable so far (this is only a couple of days mind you).

Hope that helps,

Andrew.

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## dbeer

Hi Andrew,

Thank you for your reply. The information is realy quite useful. I was just wondering if you knew how easy it is t use WEP or to enable WEP as the wireless hub will probably be using it.

I will have a good look at the products and make a decission.

Thanks again for the advice.

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## aderby

Turning on WEP is very easy - when you emerge either the madwifi or rt2500 driver you will also get the wireless tools package as a dependency.  This provides the command line tool iwconfig.  You can probably work out what to do from the man page but I found this post particularly helpful -

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-234209-highlight-ralink.html

What I haven't quite determined is how you set up you system to use WEP etc. automatically on boot.  My understanding is that new versions of baselayout (>=1.11.1) have a built in method where you put your settings in /etc/wireless but this version is still ~x86 for the moment.  I'm certain that there are a number of ways of doing it currently but I've not worked it out yet.

Andrew.

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## Wedge_

Just thought I'd give a little support to ndiswrapper  :Smile:  I use it on my laptop (Netgear WG511) and one of my desktops (Linksys WMP54G), and it works very well, connecting to a WEP-enabled access point. There's a big list of cards that have reported to work on the ndiswrapper site somewhere that's worth reading through.

 *aderby wrote:*   

> What I haven't quite determined is how you set up you system to use WEP etc. automatically on boot. My understanding is that new versions of baselayout (>=1.11.1) have a built in method where you put your settings in /etc/wireless but this version is still ~x86 for the moment. I'm certain that there are a number of ways of doing it currently but I've not worked it out yet. 

 

I don't know the best way of doing it on a non ~x86 system, but with the later baselayout versions, you put something like this in /etc/conf.d/wireless: 

```
essid_wlan0="yourssid"

key_yourssid="WEP KEY GOES HERE"

....
```

along with the other settings (IP, gateway etc), and use rc-update to start your wireless adapter on bootup. That should take care of everything for you.

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## aderby

That's it - to flesh it out a bit, the steps are - 

Make sure you have wireless support compiled into your kernel (it's under Device Drivers -> Networking Support -> Wireless LAN (non ham-radio).  You just need to choose the main option (Wireless LAN drivers (non ham-radio) & Wireless extensions) unless you are lucky enough to be using a wireless device that has built in support, in which case you should choose your device as well.

Install driver (ndis wrapper or rt2500 or madwifi also intel centrino - ipw2100&ipw2200)

```
emerge rt2500
```

You'll probably need to add your module(s) name to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 (in my case rt2500)

Some cards require firmware to be uploaded to the card - there are ebuilds for this in portage but I've not done this so I don't know what's involved.

You need to find out the interface name - iwconfig should tell you once you've loaded the correct module - in my case it's ra0

Link net.lo to your interface -

```
ln -s /etc/init.d/net.lo /etc/init.d/net.ra0
```

Set it to start on default -

```
rc-update add net.ra0 default
```

You need to add this to your modules line in /etc/conf.d/net

```
modules="!iwconfig"
```

Also add your new interface to /etc/conf.d/net with whatever IP settings your are using (dhcp is easiest but whatever it's exactly the same as for a wired nic)

```
iface_ra0="dhcp"
```

Then do the /etc/conf.d/wireless thing as Wedge_ pointed out.

Andrew.Last edited by aderby on Thu May 19, 2005 9:12 am; edited 2 times in total

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## dbeer

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the replies, it is all very useful and makes my life easier. 

I will have a good look around tommorrow for wireless devices and decide what to get.

I will keep you all informed.

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## aderby

I gave in to curiosity and upgraded my baselayout to whatever is currently ~x86 (1.12 something or other I think).  Not such a tiny upgrade as such a small version bump would make you guess.  On top of the wireless stuff the developers appear to be moving towards configuring everything in init.d via conf.d - which is a win for consistancy if not tradition.  Anyway I discovered a few things that weren't quite right with what I suggested above, so I've edited it so as not to knowingly leave false information hanging about.  I wish someone more knowlegable than myself would take on the task of producing a How To as this is something that sorely lacking at the minute.  Perhaps if there are a few others of you out there who've been through the process and can chime in with corrections/expansions (particularly for different hardware), I might be able to turn this into one myself.

Andrew.

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## dbeer

I will be trying this at some point but i have decided not to proceed with wireless due to other circumstances. 

I agree that it would be nice to have an up to date wireless how to. And all the required information.

There is very little in the way of linux or gentoo documentation for wireless yet it is becoming quite popular.

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