Archive for the ‘Slackware’ Category

Wireless configuration - related commands

Monday, September 27th, 2004

Got the Hawking Wireless card working on Slackware 10 (Dell Laptop).

I cannot say “finally” because I had never tried earlier :)

Had left the card in the PCMCIA slot during install and it installed drivers or modules for it automatically.

Leaving the card in the slot during installation has nothing to do with it.

It is when the system is rebooting that the Cardbus services are activated and

these devices detected.

Saw that KDE had KWifiManager installed. This KWifi is pretty cool. It shows the signal strength, the access point MAC address,

the IP address. Just like the Windows utility. KWiFiManger simply reports the information being handled by wireless tools. In addition, it also has different configuration profiles too.

It wouldn’t work the first time though after I changed the SSID and activated the configuration.

So I gave it a restart and it worked !

Reboot not really necessary.

I tried this and it worked!

/etc/rc.M

Apparently, this was a re-init of all services for the Multiuser profile,

I guess rc.pcmcia would have done the same.

So that got my Internet working (I saw the IP address was assigned).

It got detected as eth0, which is quite confusing. The onboard NIC became eth1.

In some distro of Linux, I had seen that the wireless connections were referred to by wlan0, wlan1 and so on…

In any case, wireless is working and at last the laptop can be moved out of my room.

It’s only this card that was working and I don’t know how to get the other cards working (as yet).

So here are some commands and snippets I learnt along the way:

/etc/rc.d/wireless - This file is read when initializing the wireless connections when booting up.

Wireless networking is managed via the /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless, /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf and /etc/rc.d/rc.wlan scripts.

Wireless Tools for Linux

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html

  • iwconfig manipulate the basic wireless parameters
  • iwlist allow to initiate scanning and list frequencies, bit-rates, encryption keys…
  • iwspy allow to get per node link quality
  • iwpriv allow to manipulate the Wireless Extensions specific to a driver (private)
  • ifrename allow to name interfaces based on various static criteria

Some links on KWifiManager

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/archive/3/2003/11/4/118736

Slackware 10 on a Dell Laptop

http://www.mikeoliveri.com/utils/dellslack.html

Slackware Network Configuration

http://openskills.info/view/boxdetail.php?IDbox=1103&boxtype=distro

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