Last modified 2006-May-7
Wireless cards for laptops are often a problem under Linux. The best approach is to buy a card that is Linux-friendly, not to try to get a Linux-unfriendly card (like the LINKSYS WPC11) to work. I have had completely smooth sailing with the Dell Truemobile 1150 wireless PCMCIA card. This card works out of the box. Configuring a wireless connection by hand is also easy. If the card is detected as network device eth0 then you create /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:
---- DEVICE=eth0 USERCTL=yes ONBOOT=no BOOTPROTO=dhcp NETMASK= IPADDR= BROADCAST= NETWORK= TYPE=Wireless DHCP_HOSTNAME= ESSID= # supply ESSID here if you know it CHANNEL=6 MODE=Auto RATE=Auto ----
If you have a WEP-encrypted wireless network, put the key in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/keys-eth0:
---- KEY=12345F678 ----
If not, make sure there is no keys-eth0 file, or that there is one with a blank entry "KEY=". Now the command ifup eth0 will start the wireless connection and ifdown eth0 will stop it.
Copyright © Mark Alford (2005)
alford(at)physics.wustl.edu