Knute Johnson wrote:
When I first tried to setup my Linksys WPC54GS card on FC4 I had a
really hard time finding the right information. Since it went really
smooth on FC5, and it works even better, I thought I would post it
for anybody else trying to figure out how to make it work. I can't
be the only one that had trouble although I guess it is possible :-).
The Linksys WPC54GS card needs ndiswrapper, Windows drivers and
wpa_supplicant. FC5 includes wpa_supplicant so that makes it a
little simpler. So here are the steps I followed:
1) If you don't have it already get the kernel-devel package:
yum install kernel-devel
2) Get ndiswrapper source from here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndiswrapper/
3) There is a great wiki for installation here:
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Installation
but I will list the steps
4) Download the Windows drivers for the WPC54GS card from Linksys.
The wiki tells you to be careful about which drivers you use but I'm
using version 2.1 and they work fine.
5) Extract the source tree from the downloaded tar.gz file, change
into the ndiswrapper-1.?? directory and run make distclean and make
install. CD into the Windows driver directory and:
/usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -i LSBCMNDS.inf
to install the driver. Then type
/usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -l
to check the installation. Then type:
/usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -m
to put the file ndiswrapper in /etc/modprobe.d. The ndiswrapper file
has the line - alias wlan0 ndiswrapper.
Then do /sbin/depmod -a
and /sbin/modprobe ndiswrapper
6) Now you need to configure your wpa_supplicant.conf file located
in /etc/wpa_supplicant. Mine looks like this:
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant # for wpa_cli support
network = {
ssid="MYSSID"
psk="paSSPhraSe"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=WPA
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
}
If you are not using TKIP then change the file accordingly.
You can now bring up the wireless network by typing:
/sbin/service wpa_supplicant restart
/sbin/dhclient wlan0
I wanted to have my network start up when I started my computer so I
added a couple of other items:
In /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts add an ifcfg-wlan0 file:
DEVICE=wlan0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=no
TYPE=wireless
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=yes
IPV6INIT=no
DHCP_HOSTNAME=kjlaptop
I set ONBOOT=no because this script will run before wpa_supplicant is
running so it would fail if it is set to yes. The only other thing
that needs to happen is to call ifup. I wanted that to happen
automatically so I added a file to /etc/rc.d/rc5.d, S57startwlan0,
right before S58ntpd, to give wpa_supplicant time to associate.
It has one line:
/sbin/ifup wlan0
I am by no means a Linux or wireless expert. This setup works for me
but I would certainly appreciate any suggestions or comments. I
wanted to post this to hopefully help some other Linux blivets like
me get their wireless cards up and running on FC5.
Thanks for posting this! I have a Linsys WPC54G card I want to get
working and have not yet succeeded. I'll try your technique later
today. A couple of questions:
1) Is there a specific reason you started with ndiswrapper source rather
than install the rpm from livna repo?
2) If I use only WEP encryption, should I be able to just ignore the
steps above associated with wpa_supplicant?
Thanks. Gerry
