February, 2011

Linux wireless networking with Fedora

This is all quite obsolete. I gave up on the wireless connection to my workshop, but the bullet and buried a cat5 cable and it has been working just fine for several years now. No damage due to rodents or lightning or misplaced shovels.

I had ideas once about high gain antennas (maybe even wardriving), as in this link:

Too many other more interesting things to do however.

Long ago (circa Fedora 2) I wrote a note about how I was doing wireless with the wlanng drivers and my Prism chipset PCMCIA card. Things have changed a lot since then, almost entirely for the better. Nonetheless, I have preserved those old notes for the curious and/or desperate.

I found this guide quite helpful.

Now (February 2011) I am running Fedora 14, and using a USB wireless dongle to connect a computer in my workshop to the access point in my house.

Fedora does the right thing and detects my hardware and sets it up as wlan0. In fact, if I check with the ifconfig -a I see the interface all ready to go, all I had to do is to plug the device in. (The device in question is a Rosewill RNX-G1, which I like quite a lot so far.) You can also give the command iwconfig to learn lots of interesting things about the wireless network interfaces in your system.

The next step requires Network Manager, which a person usually has as part of a Fedora installation, but I disable (and sometimes even delete it) from all of my systems that are on copper, because it always is doing stupid things like rewriting files that I carefully configure by hand, which makes me hate and despise it. However, if you are on a wireless system, then Network Manager is your friend.

On the system in question I had merely disabled it, so to bring it back, all I had to do was:

service NetworkManager restart
chkconfig NetworkManager on
I was afraid that I would have to get an rpm on a flash key and put Network Manager back on that system, but fortunately I wasn't as angry with it as I usually am when I disabled it.

After this, things get pretty easy. If you are running gnome (if you are not, I can't help you), you look at the upper right corner of your screen for something (a little icon) that looks sort of like a little pair of screens with a red X at their lower right corner. You left click on this and should see a menu of the wireless networks in your area. Pick the one you like, set up the credentials, and you are set. In my case this was just a matter of entering my pass phrase into the field supplied and I was on the air.

Once you have your chosen network set up, things just work, and the network manager icon becomes a flakey sort of signal strength indicator. When weird things happen, various pop-ups afflict you.


Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org