[RESOLVED] Wifi network card?

[wossname]

Has anyone had any luck getting a PCI wifi card working under linux?

I've got a Sitecom one and Fedora Core 4 won't detect it.

I'm quite prepared to believe that FC4 is too old for this kind of thing but I'm reluctant to go upto FC6 until i've had a good go at getting ut to work under FC4.

Any ideas guys?

[sunburnt]

Wireless is the one big hardware area where you can run in to problems. I have a broadcom atheros chipset-based card on my machine, which requires binary drivers to work correctly. Before those were available, I used ndiswrapper.

You should identify what chipset your card is based off of; there may not be drivers for your card, but there may be drivers for another card with the same chipset that works for you.

For my atheros based card, I run madwifi. If you can't find anything native that works, the last hope is to try using ndiswrapper.

Install ndiswrapper from your repo, build from source, or whatever. Then, download the windows drivers for your wireless card (or if you have a CD, you could use that too).
Locate the driver information file (the .INF file) and with root permissions, try the following:

# ndiswrapper -i Driver.inf
# ndiswrapper -l

Hopefully you will see "driver present, hardware present." or something similar. Go ahead and load the ndiswrapper module:

# modprobe ndiswrapper

Now configure the wireless interface using iwconfig. If the new interface doesn't show up here, you might be borked. If it does, and it works, go ahead and set the ndiswrapper module to load at startup:

# ndiswrapper -m

A good test is to run:

iwlist <wirelessinterface> scan

as root; if it prints out your available access points, hopefully the driver will work.

Good luck!

[mightor]

Has anyone had any luck getting a PCI wifi card working under linux?

I've got a Sitecom one and Fedora Core 4 won't detect it.

I'm quite prepared to believe that FC4 is too old for this kind of thing but I'm reluctant to go upto FC6 until i've had a good go at getting ut to work under FC4.

Any ideas guys?

I think you should try out FC6 first or even download Ubuntu and see if it works there. A commercial alternative for ndiswrapper is Driverloader by Linuxant. You can find them here: http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/ . With my previous laptop I found that the Network Card (A linksys PCMCIA card) wouldn't work properly with ndiswrapper (WPA wasn't supported). However, Driverloader made the card work flawlessly. It works pretty much the same way ndiswrapper works. You make point it at the windows XP drivers and it will just load those into the kernel with the help of a wrapper module. The nice thing about Driverloader is that it has a very easy to use web interface to configure it. The only downside is that it costs about $20. An hour of my time messing with ndiswrapper to try and make it work is worth more than that, which is why I went ahead and got it. You can get a trial license to see if you can make your card work with it, so it's pretty much risk free.

Good luck,
Mightor

[wossname]

Awesome, thanks for the pointers guys I'll try this out tonight.

[wossname]

Ok. Following Sunburnt's tips under FC6...

I've successfully installed (from source) the ndiswrapper and I've configured it to use the windows driver at startup (I think).

I've rebooted the box for good measure. If I run iwlist then I can see a few networks within range (all the names are familiar to me from setting up my router several months ago). So from this I know for sure that the hardware is working, so far so good

However, the wifi card isn't brought up at bootup unlike the normal cabled eth0 device which I've unplugged for the time being (for simplicity).

So I need to work out how to get FC6 to bring "wlan0" up at boottime instead of eth0.

Can you shed some light on this part?

Thanks again (both of you) for your help so far.

[sunburnt]

You might try adding the following lines to the wifi0 section in your network interfaces file (on my system it is /etc/network/interfaces):

auto wifi0
iface wifi0 inet dhcp

If you notice that at boot it tries to bring up the interface but fails, you might also try:

auto wifi0
iface wifi0 inet dhcp
pre-up modprobe ndiswrapper
post-down rmmod ndiswrapper

Hope this helps.

[mightor]

You might try adding the following lines to the wifi0 section in your network interfaces file (on my system it is /etc/network/interfaces):
.
.

Please note that this (/etc/network/interfaces) is for Debian based systems only, such as Ubuntu. Other distros may include it as well, but I am not familiar with ALL Linux distros out there. For RedHat-based systems such as Fedora, use /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-<interface name>, for example: ifcfg-eth0 or ifcfg-wifi0. I just typed the path to this file from the top of my head as I am not on a Linux box right now, so it may be slightly off. I believe there is a man page for this file, man ifcfg otherwise try the man page for ifup or ifdown, it will have references to the appropriate man page.

Gr,
Mightor

[wossname]

Hurrah, some progress.

I'm now connected to my LAN via wifi, however I've had to change to WEP security. (it was formerly on WPA(PSK). iwconfig apparently doesn't understand WPA keys.

I had to faff around with the route tables as well but thats to be expected.

I'm going to have a chat with the networking guys at work tomorrow. I know they've got a good idea about redhat/fedora in particular. I'll report my findings here once everything is configured satisfactorily.

Thanks again you guys.

[Atheist]

Using the newest Ubuntu distro, I could use my netgear wg311t directly without installing any drivers at all

[wossname]

Yes, quite possibly. But I'm using a selective installation of FC6, which is optimised for dev tools and little else.

Actually, what GCC and G++ versions does ubuntu ship with? If you've got a version number for httpd an mysql that would be cool too.

[sunburnt]

I am running 7.04 ("Edgy")
gcc: 4.1.2
apache2: 2.2.3
mysqld: 5.0.38
php: 5.2.1

These will of course have several debian or ubuntu patches rolled in too.

[mightor]

Hurrah, some progress.

I'm now connected to my LAN via wifi, however I've had to change to WEP security. (it was formerly on WPA(PSK). iwconfig apparently doesn't understand WPA keys.

I had to faff around with the route tables as well but thats to be expected.

I'm going to have a chat with the networking guys at work tomorrow. I know they've got a good idea about redhat/fedora in particular. I'll report my findings here once everything is configured satisfactorily.

Thanks again you guys.

To make WPA work you need a little util called "wpasupplicant" or "wpa_supplicant" (can't remember off the top of my head). It is super easy to configure, considering you got as far as you did
You run it after the card comes up and it will do all the associating with your AP (Access Point) as configured by its settings file (usually /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf). It comes with a few nice examples in its /usr/share sub directory and I think the config file in /etc has a few commented out examples as well. You need only a very bare minimum config.

Gr,
Mightor

[mightor]

Your distro should probably have its own packaged version of wpa_supplicant, but just in case it doesn't, here's the URL for it: http://hostap.epitest.fi/wpa_supplicant/.

They have an example config for standard (at home) WPA setups here.

# WPA-PSK/TKIP

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
	ssid="example wpa-psk network"
	key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
	proto=WPA
	pairwise=TKIP
	group=TKIP
	psk="secret passphrase"
}

For each network you'd like to connect to, you can add a new 'network' stanza, wpa_supplicant will pick the correct one. Later on you can get fancy and use the supplied X-window tool to allow you to enter the passwd when you connect. You're on your own there though, because I never bothered with that

Here's a nice Wiki article on how to configure it: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Wpa_supplicant

Gr,
Mightor

[wossname]

Resolved.

In the end I opted for the distro-independant method of having a pair of custom scripts to bring up the wlan0 device at runlevels 2, 3, 4 and 5 and to take it down again at runlevel 6.

I'm sticking with WEP at the moment, its good enough for my needs and in any case I've added a mac address Allow filter.

[tr333]

You should look into installing NetworkManager, which makes connecting to wired and wireless networks incredibly easy, via a simple GUI taskbar applet. It should be available in your distro's package repository. I managed to get WPA2 working with no terminal access required (Apple Powerbook with a Broadcom chipset).

Install info for ubuntu can be found on the Ubuntu Documentation website.

[CyberSurfer]

I've had no end of trouble with NetworkManager - it may be fine for desktop usage but if you need any measure of reliability from your connection you're far better sticking with your custom scripts!!

[wossname]

Network manager is a bag of nails. I agree with CyberSurfer.

[tr333]

It's working fine for me on Ubuntu (installed by default)
If you find bugs, why not submit them to Bugzilla?

[CyberSurfer]

Since I'm talking about using this network management functionality in a proffessional capacity at work, I don't have time to sit down and document all the bugs I've found in someone elses product. I hardly have time to keep up with all the stuff *I'm* responsible for fixing!! If I discover something doesn't work the way I want it to, I'll find something that does