{"id":759,"date":"2007-03-29T22:46:08","date_gmt":"2007-03-29T21:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2007\/03\/configuring-wireless-ethernet-with-fedora-core-5.htm"},"modified":"2007-06-07T00:27:28","modified_gmt":"2007-06-06T23:27:28","slug":"configuring-wireless-ethernet-with-fedora-core-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2007\/03\/configuring-wireless-ethernet-with-fedora-core-5.htm","title":{"rendered":"Configuring wireless Ethernet with Fedora Core 5"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year, I wrote a post about my efforts in configuring wireless Ethernet with SuSE Linux 10.0<\/a>. I couldn’t maintain a connection (at the time I was using an IBM ThinkPad T40, a D-Link DWL-G630 PCMCIA card and a D-Link DWL-2000AP+ access point) but this week I decided to give it all another try, this time on a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S7010D, which was already running Fedora Core 5 and has a built-in Intel Centrino<\/a> chipset (hence it should be more widely supported by Linux than the D-Link card was – avoiding the need to use NDISwrapper<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The good news is that the Lifebook’s wireless chipset does have Linux support in the form of native drivers. The bad news is that it’s still not as easy as it should be to get this working! Having said that, I went down so many blind alleys that I’m not really sure what I did in the end to get the drivers installed. Hopefully the jumble of notes below will provide one or two pointers for someone else.<\/p>\n

Identifying the hardware<\/h3>\n

First of all, I needed to know what type of wireless hardware I had and a spot of googling quickly turned up Jean Tourrilhes Linux Wireless LAN Howto<\/a>, which contains links to many resources but actually gives me the answer to my question – there are three main Intel PRO\/Wireless chipsets – the 2100 is an IEEE 802.11b card, the 2200 adds IEEE 802.11g support and the 2915 supports IEEE 802.11a. The later cards also add support for increased security (WPA, etc.). I already knew that the card in my notebook supported 802.11g (pointing to an Intel PRO\/Wireless 2200) but confirmed this with the lspci<\/code> command, returning (in part):<\/p>\n

01:0d.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO\/Wireless 2200BG (rev 05)<\/em><\/p>\n

Downloading and installing drivers<\/h3>\n

After arming me with information about my computer hardware, Jean’s howto set me off in the direction of two open source projects – the IEEE 802.11 subsystem for Linux<\/a> and the Intel PRO\/Wireless 2200BG driver for Linux<\/a> project. One slight problem for me is that the drivers contained on these two sites need to be compiled… and I’m a sort of namby-pamby-need-to-have-it-already-built-for-me Linux user (sorry, but I am). Time to hit my search engine of choice again, this time turning up tutorials for installing Fedora Core 5 on a Dell Latitude D610<\/a> (it seems I’m not alone in not being “a ‘compile from source’ guy”) and installing Fedora Core N on a Dell Latitude D600<\/a> (including Intel PRO\/Wireless 2200BG support) as well as a comment on a Fedora Core 5 Tips and Tricks<\/a> page that suggested the following process for installing the earlier Intel PRO\/Wireless 2100 (for which the process should be similar except for the actual driver files):<\/p>\n

Some have asked for step by steps to install the drivers for the Intel Centrino Pro Wireless 2100 chip set. Here is an easy way to get up and running and have a nice GUI in GNOME. This assumes you already have NetworkManager installed from the base Fedora Core 5 repository.<\/p>\n

yum install NetworkManager NetworkManager-gnome<\/code><\/p>\n

Update your system to the latest kernel. Be careful as this can break other kernel modules you have installed, so be sure you have the source\/RPMS handy for any packages that may need to be recompiled\/reinstalled.<\/p>\n

yum update kernel<\/code><\/p>\n

Add the ATrpms (atrpms.net) repositiory to yum.<\/p>\n

wget http:\/\/ATrpms.net\/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
\nrpm --import RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms<\/code><\/p>\n

Next, install the drivers using yum. There are several dependacies [sic] that it will install as well.<\/p>\n

yum install ipw2100<\/code><\/p>\n

Next, enable NetworkManager to start on boot up.<\/p>\n

chkconfig NetworkManager on
\nchkconfig NetworkManagerDispatcher on<\/code><\/p>\n

Reboot your machine so the new kernel module is loaded.<\/p>\n

init 6<\/code><\/p>\n

Once you boot up and login to GNOME, you should see a new icon by the clock. This is very similar to the wireless manager one can find in a very popular commercial OS. (Names omitted to protect the innocent.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was all very well, until I got to the point of installing Intel\/PRO 2200 drivers (using yum install ipw2200<\/code> in place of the yum install ipw2100 command in the quote above), which just flatly refused to find anything appropriate.<\/p>\n

To further complicate things, in the process, I’d updated to the latest i686<\/a> kernel (2.6.20-1.2300.fc5 in place of 2.6.17-1.2157_FC5) and I could only find RPMs<\/a> at ATrpms<\/a> for:<\/p>\n