Setting up wireless manually

[mystified]

As you guys know I've been having fits with mandriva's wireless connection tools. Being a Gentoo user I set up my internet connection manually and I always have well documented wiki's to follow and get step by step instructions from. But I've googled and all I can find are the gui tools for mandriva which are obviously buggy.

 

So can anybody tell me how to set up wireless in mandriva, using ndiswrapper, manually? I am determined to get this working. Thanks for your patience! :)

 

mysti

[ianw1974]

Hi mysti,

 

I tend to follow the ndiswrapper wiki. Since I don't compile, I use the urpmi command to install ndiswrapper, and then continue from the:

 

ndiswrapper -i

 

command in the wiki. I then follow this through and bring up the interface. I do turn security off on the access point, so it's freely available to anyone for this, to make sure that ndiswrapper is working.

 

After this, I manually configure wpa_supplicant, because I use WPA to secure my access point. You can't configure this with the gui in Mandriva, because it completely screws it up. I have a basic config for this, however, I don't know if you'd be using wpa or not or wep from your previous posts.

 

The ndiswrapper wiki:

 

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawi...hp/Installation

 

There are some other steps you need to do to make sure that it will work though, which is not listed here. This is Mandriva specific, as I couldn't get it working on reboot without manually bringing the interface up. First, you have to do:

 

ifconfig -a

 

and find out if your wireless interface is listed as wlan0 or ath0 or something else. Then, check /etc/modprobe.conf and see if it has this line:

 

alias wlan0 ndiswrapper

 

if your device is ath0, as mine is for atheros chipsets, then you have to change wlan0 to ath0, since you'll be pointing to a device that doesn't exist otherwise.

 

Then, after this, edit /etc/modprobe.preload and just add:

 

ndiswrapper

 

to this file. I found that without this, even with the alias in modprobe.conf the device would not be activated at boot. Loading the module at boot in the modprobe.preload file sorted it out for me.

 

I never used the gui for configuring ndiswrapper, and this is how I did it.

[mystified]

Thanks ian. I'm sure I'll get lost somewhere but I'll give it a try. :)

[coverup]

My suggestion would still be give the Linuxant driverloader a try...

[iphitus]

that'll get your wireless working. though I would like to know, what chipset is it? a majority of chipsets now have usable native drivers available. though mandrake's kernel is so pathetically old - two weeks short of a year now - many will not work on it.

 

After you've loaded your driver, however you decide to do that, to configure it you use 'iwconfig'

 

iwconfig is a pretty easy thing to use, it tells your wireless card what your wireless network settings are, so it can associate/talk with the access point. think of it as the wireless equivalent of plugging in an ethernet cable. just run iwconfig wlanX setting parameter. the settings and format of all parameters are listed in the man page. in most cases, you'll need to set the mode and essid at least, and if you use wep, 'key' as well.

 

once iwconfig has set the settings to your wireless card, you then actually connect to the network. in most cases, you'll just use dhcp, which depending on your distro's setup can be as easy as 'dhcpcd wlanX' or 'dhclient wlanX' - or ethX if that's your wireless card.

 

as for putting wpa into this whole setup, take a look around - coverup i think it was, has shown his knowledge a few times regarding this.

 

James

Edited June 1, 2006 by iphitus

[ianw1974]

that'll get your wireless working. though I would like to know, what chipset is it? a majority of chipsets now have usable native drivers available. though mandrake's kernel is so pathetically old - two weeks short of a year now - many will not work on it.

 

Not as bad as debian:

 

uname -r
2.6.8-3-686

 

That kernel was Mandrake 10.1 if I remember correctly. That's getting near to two years old! :P

[iphitus]

that'll get your wireless working. though I would like to know, what chipset is it? a majority of chipsets now have usable native drivers available. though mandrake's kernel is so pathetically old - two weeks short of a year now - many will not work on it.

 

Not as bad as debian:

 

uname -r
2.6.8-3-686

 

kinda weak defence, debian stable is aimed at an entirely different target user. most likely for servers or workstations - you're not going to find many people using deb stable as their desktop's primary OS, most would be more likely to have testing, 2.6.15 or unstable, 2.6.16.

 

mandrake on the other hand is aimed at the desktop -- and it's pretty pathetic when they cant keep support for common desktop hardware even mildly up to date. I know what's involved in packaging and releasing a distro kernel, I maintain one myself, and I simply dont think mandriva's really puttin the effort in that they should, or at least not in the right places.

 

anyway, that's OT -- how are you goin with your wireless mysti? did you find what chipset?

 

James

[mystified]

Yes I know the chipset. I'm going to have to review everything and then work on it. But between school and work it'll probably have to wait until Sunday when I have a day off. I really appreciate all the info. One thing I'm not sure of tho and maybe it was covered and I missed it is how to set up WEP with my encryption key.

[ianw1974]

The ndiswrapper installation link I gave you has this not far from the bottom:

 

If you use encryption WEP, set the key:

iwconfig wlan0 key restricted XXXXXXXX

 

Although, once you've gotten it working without the encryption, I'll find out where we need to put it in Mandriva's config files. The above line will help to do it manually, but I'm sure it's probably stored somewhere, most likely in ifcfg-wlan0 file or something like that.

[mystified]

Ok, I compiled ndiswrapper from source and followed the directions. Everything seemed to go well when I ran ifconfig -a. It came up with eth0 which had an internal ip address, lo, sit0 and wlan0. But when I tried running alias wlan0 ndiswrapper I get

alias ndiswrapper not found and wlan0 not found

It did find the driver and it was installed. eth0 is my direct cable connection, wlan0 is my wireless. Here's the output from wlan0 -

wlan0	 Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:16:CE:13:E2:08
	  inet6 addr: fe80::216:ceff:fe13:e208/64 Scope:Link
	  UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
	  RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
	  TX packets:1 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
	  collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
	  RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:90 (90.0 b)
	  Interrupt:17 Memory:e2000000-e2002000

 

What next?

[kmc77]

Mystified, here's what I ended up having to do in FC5 to get my wireless running

Install ndiswrapper.

 

Once installed:

 

/usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -i /your/wireless/driver/location

/usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -l (to find out if file was loaded)

modprobe ndiswrapper

dmesg (see if there are any errors with your setup)

 

 

Edit /etc/modprobe.conf and add these lines

 

alias eth1 ndiswrapper

options ndiswrapper if_name=eth1

(or whatever you want your connection to be called. ((eth5, wlan1, etc.))

 

Create the file: /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 and add these lines

 

IPV6INIT=no

ONBOOT=yes

USERCTL=yes

PEERDNS=yes

GATEWAY=

TYPE=wireless

DEVICE=eth1

HWADDR=

BOOTPROTO=dhcp

NETMASK=

DHCP_HOSTNAME=

IPADDR=

DOMAIN=

ESSID=youressid

CHANNEL=6

MODE=Managed

NETWORK_TYPE=g

#RATE=54Mb/s

RATE=Auto

 

Create the file: /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/keys-eth1 and add this line (if your network has no password security, leave password blank)

 

KEY=(your key)

 

Then: ifup eth1

 

Hopefully this can be of some help to you.

 

*EDIT*By the way, the eth1 there is not a typo. I set up my lan card on eth0 and my wireless on eth1

Edited June 5, 2006 by kmc77

[ianw1974]

From the ndiswrapper wiki, there is a command that adds:

 

"alias wlan0 ndiswrapper"

 

to /etc/modprobe.conf. Did you check to see if this command added this line? There's no need to type it manually at the command line, the ndiswrapper command should do it.

[Steve Scrimpshire]

ndiswrapper -m

 

My router uses open WEP, so mine was

 

iwconfig wlan0 open blahblah

[iphitus]

Steve, i think you mean,

 

iwconfig wlan0 key open blahblah

 

James

[Steve Scrimpshire]

Yeah, that.