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View Full Version : Wireless with a netgear wg511U... few questions

mjgroves
2005-12-22, 12:42 AM CST
Hello everyone,

After trying about 4 or 5 different distros of linux, I finally settled on the reliability and looks of RH. You just cant beat it.

Before I start, I just want to let everyone know what I am a new user to Linux, but I have done a few days worth of testing and reading on the subject. The questions im about to ask arent noob "walk me through everything before i read anything" questions. Please be patient and post in detail if you have a solution.

So, today I installed Fedora Core 4 on my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop. Installation, updates using yum, and everything else works fine. Except for my wireless card.

The wireless card I have uses an Atheros chipset, which i found the madwifi drivers for. Installed using yum, rebooted. Found the driver when doing Network Config-> add wireless device -> atheros communications. I CAN connect perfectly fine to my router and surf the internet. Great! But one thing. I dont want to have a network totally unprotected in a busy area like this.

I then installed wpa_supplicant using yum. Followed this guide: http://fedoranews.org/blog/?p=599.

After running this line:

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

I get a few handshaking messages and it says i am connected. After this, I go to my network configuration, activate my connection... and im in!! Everything works at this point.

NOW TO THE QUESTIONS:

1. If I reboot my computer, I sit there for 30 seconds waiting for my ath0 to activate, which it never does. How can I set this so wpa supplicant starts up BEFORE the card tries to activate. Basically im asking how do I automatically have wpa and my wireless card activate during boot so I dont have to worry about retyping and reactivating my card every time when i start my computer.

NOTE: I also found this guide: http://www.metahusky.net/~gavin/home/wireless.html

The last step tells me to

"Add the following lines after the comment in /etc/init.d/network"

/sbin/modprobe ndiswrapper
/usr/local/bin/wpa_supplicant -Dndiswrapper -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf &

Which comments is he talking about? I see a million sections with comments. Just thought i would post about this guide if it will help anyone.

2. I saw this thing called NetworkManager, and it looks wonderful. Does this support WPA yet?



Thanks again for your help. Its much appreciated.
mjgroves
2005-12-22, 11:46 AM CST
Nobody knows how to automate wpa supplicant during startup? Wow.
mjgroves
2005-12-22, 02:51 PM CST
I see support for linux is pretty much nonexistant. Forget it. I moved back to the reliability of windows for now.
funchords
2005-12-22, 06:27 PM CST
I see support for linux is pretty much nonexistant. Forget it. I moved back to the reliability of windows for now.

After one day? Sheeesh.

There are a few ways to skin this cat ... here's mine.

At the very end of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless, add these two lines:

killall -q wpa_supplicant
wpa_supplicant -iath0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -Dmadwifi -Bw

... there's also another solution floating around here involving a new script called ifdown-wireless ... you can search for it if you want.
mjgroves
2005-12-22, 07:19 PM CST
Sorry ive been at it for like 3 days straight now and I guess it seemed like a longer wait. Just got a little frustrated something could be so easy in windows and not linux.

Sorry about that. Thanks for your reply, maybe ill give it another go.
tresslyn
2005-12-22, 10:21 PM CST
Why did you want to use Linux?
mjgroves
2005-12-22, 10:24 PM CST
We have a few linux machines here and I thought I would try to become more knowledgable on the topic. Harder than it looks, and IMHO nowhere near mainstream yet. I also do alot of programming in my computer science classes and was going to use kdevelop and such to code.

I also did try your suggestion funchords and it works perfectly fine. Amazing i couldnt find that anywhere. Thank you so much.
funchords
2005-12-22, 10:30 PM CST
We have a few linux machines here and I thought I would try to become more knowledgable on the topic. Harder than it looks, and IMHO nowhere near mainstream yet. I also do alot of programming in my computer science classes and was going to use kdevelop and such to code.

I also did try your suggestion funchords and it works perfectly fine. Amazing i couldnt find that anywhere. Thank you so much.

Glad I could help.

I'm with you -- this isn't ready to be "Grandma and Grandpa's" O/S ... but it's getting there. It's more like Windows 95 than XP home.

But the amount of software available now is impressive, and often free.
techmatt
2005-12-24, 07:50 PM CST
Glad I could help.

I'm with you -- this isn't ready to be "Grandma and Grandpa's" O/S ... but it's getting there. It's more like Windows 95 than XP home.

But the amount of software available now is impressive, and often free.

This is why I'm trying to use linux more and more, but man it is hard comming from windows