Coyote sharing his experience with a famous Singapore tech forum on how to get wireless networking working in linux. He is using DWL-G520 network card and Fedora Core 4 linux to demonstrate how easy to get wireless networking in Linux.

According to Coyote, basically there are two parts in getting it working:
1) Installing the linux drivers for the D-Link DWL-G520 network card.
2) Getting the OS to be support WPA encryption, such that the card can connect to the router using the protocol.

1. Install the madwifi driver

Add the following section into /etc/yum.conf

[atrpms]
name=Fedora Core $releasever – $basearch – ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/fc$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable

To retrieve the public key for ATrpm,

rpm –import http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms

Installing the madwifi drivers by using yum

yum install madwifi

2. Installing & configuring wpa_supplicant

Again using yum to install wpa_supplicant

yum install wpa_supplicant

Edit /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
ssid=”myssid”
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=WPA
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
psk=”my_psk_key”
}

To activate the DWL-G520 with wpa protocol

wpa_supplicant -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -iath0 -Dmadwifi -B

Activate the network adapter

dhclient ath0

To read more on the detail description, read DLink gaming router & 108Mbps wireless card in Linux.

[tags]Linux Driver, Wireless in Linux [/tags]

I received email from David, for his trouble in wireless connection using Mandriva.

I am having problem with my wireless connection using Mandriva Linux 2006. I’m using a D-Link Airplus G+ laptop card with NdisWrapper to connect to my D-Link G604T wireless router on bootup. Everything starts OK and if I check /etc/resolv.conf the name server is set to 212.30.8.151. All is well for about 20 to 30 minutes and then I find I am unable to connect to any webpages. The network is still showing as up but when I check /etc/resolv.conf again, it now reads ‘nameserver 192.168.1.1′ and I have to set up my wireless connection using Mandriva Control Center all over again.
This happens regardless of whether I have WEP encryption set. I had a similiar problem using Mandriva Linux 2005 and overcome this by setting the permission to resolv.conf as read only, but this doesn’t seem to work with 2006.

Mandriva is using DHCP to get web address and routing information from the router. It would appear that your router is running as DHCP server but not a DNS server / cache. This router provide both services, so it is likely that DNS is either disabled or misconfigured. In fact, the router is telling your computer to use it as DNS server, which should work. The solution is to go into the DNS’s section of router’s web configuration and set it to Auto Discovery. If this fails, you can set the servers manually on the same page.

Alternatively, you can prevent Mandriva from upgrade the DNS server via DHCP. Go into Mandriva Control Center > Network & Internet > Reconfiguration A Network Interface, select your interface, go to the DHCP tab and turn off the option to Get DNS Servers From DHCP. Setting /etc/resolv.conf to read-only will not help if DHCP client is running as root, since root is still able to modify write-protected files.

[tags]wireless lost, Mandriva, Linux, Linux Network Howto[/tags]

I received email from Johns on setting up wireless home network.

I currently use Alcatel modem (Speed Touch 330) given to me from ISP and I simply can’t get to work with Gentoo Linux (2.6.9 Kernel). I decided to build a wireless home network, so I’m planning to buy a D-Link DSL-G604T wireless ADSL router.

My first question is: Is this hardware fully compatible with Linux or do I need to install any drivers as with the Alcatel modem?

I have notebook and wanted to connect it to the network through a wireless cardbus adapter. I want a card supported natively by a kernel module, something that could work straight out of the box. After some reading, I found that it should be a card with Prism 2/2.5/3 chipset, but I’m confused and don’t know how to find a manufacturer or vendor of a popular cheap card with that chipset. So my second is, can you suggest a good adaptor using Prism chipset?

The wireless router from D-Link will make the connection to your ISP over DSL circuit, so you will not need any PPPoE or PPPoA support on the Linux system.

You can connect straight into the router using Ethernet and DHCP against the router for an internal IP address. Essentially, everything will be offloaded on to the router, making you Linux system a plain old workstation, rather than a router.

As far as PCMCIA wireless adaptors are concerned, you can check out www.linux-wlan.org or www.prism54.org

You’ll find that Prism54 identifies devices supporting the 802.22g standard as well as 802.22b for faster connectivity. Prism2 and Prism54 cards are identified by Knoppix at boot time, and will enable you to access the internet easily without having to install a large number of supporting packages.

I’m highly recommending you to read Wi-Fi Toys: 15 Cool Wireless Projects for Home, Office, and Entertainment.

Hardware drivers can be a real pain for Linux users. If the manufacturer does not release the specifications of its hardware, it can be difficult, if not possible, to reverse engineer the information needed to write a driver.

True, a few manufacturers are enlightened enough to release Linux drivers or information, but most are content with ensuring their product works with Windows.

While it would be nice be able to boycott such hardware, there’s not much we can do if the laptop’s integrated wireless card has no Linux driver.

Ndiswrapper is a driver wrapper that clever emulates the Windows Network Driver Interface Specification for wireless drivers, so that it can run the Windows driver that came with the card. Most distros include Ndiswrapper. Ndiswrapper can be download from http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net. Install it using distro’s package manager, then load in the Windows driver. Look on the CD that came with the card for the INF file that corresponds to your card, and load it as root with

ndiswrapper -i /path/to/driver.inf

You can check that it is correctly loaded and available to Ndiswrapper with

ndiswrapper -l

Now it’s possible to load the driver at any time with

modprobe ndiswrapper

Add NdisWrapper to whichever file your distro uses for loading modules at startup. This varies between distros: Mandriva uses /etc/modules, SUSE uses one file for each module in /etc/modules.d and Gentoo uses /etc/modules.

[tags]Ndiswrapper, Linux Driver[/tags]