WiFi setup
in [UK Linux]
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From: Alec Ross on 12 Jan 2007 16:32 Hi, I'm looking for advice on a fairly simple way to get a WiFi installation running. I have tried - so far unsuccessfully - to get a SuSE setup to use a Belkin wireless card (details below); but I'd be prepared to change the distro and/or the card to get a simple setup working. I've been using a a Belkin wireless G, version 3000uk card, having been told that this version has an appropriate chipset to work w/ SuSE 10.0, and openSUSE 10.2. (Though not - at least directly - w/ 10.1) I have been told that it has worked OTB w/ a fresh installation of 10.2. I've tried on a 10.0 setup, an upgrade to 10.2, and a fresh install of 10.2 - all without success. Though the card is detected, I have not yet been able to achieve a connection. The gateway is set up to do NAT, and will support multiple concurrent wireless clients. (And I have this working with MS Win.) From the 'net I can find various indirect approaches (ndis wrapper ...); but I suspect that the problem may be due to inappropriate settings that I've entered via the YaST dialogs. Can anyone help? I'd be happy to post relevant extracts of the system log if this would be useful. As mentioned above, I'd be happy to start again from scratch w/ a different distro and/or card if necessary, provided there is a simple setup that is likely to work straight away. (And/or has good, and simple, diagnostics of any problems.) TIA Alec -- Alec Ross
From: Paul F. Johnson on 12 Jan 2007 16:55 Alec Ross wrote: > I've been using a a Belkin wireless G, version 3000uk card, having been > told that this version has an appropriate chipset to work w/ SuSE 10.0, > and openSUSE 10.2. (Though not - at least directly - w/ 10.1) I have > been told that it has worked OTB w/ a fresh installation of 10.2. Which chipset does it use? I've seen sets which say they work under Linux - but in reality, whoever wrote the line didn't know what they were on about! TTFN Paul -- Sie k�nnen mich aufreizen und wirklich hei� machen!
From: Whiskers on 12 Jan 2007 17:21 On 2007-01-12, Alec Ross <alec(a)arlross.demon.co.uk> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm looking for advice on a fairly simple way to get a WiFi installation > running. > > I have tried - so far unsuccessfully - to get a SuSE setup to use a > Belkin wireless card (details below); but I'd be prepared to change the > distro and/or the card to get a simple setup working. > > I've been using a a Belkin wireless G, version 3000uk card, having been > told that this version has an appropriate chipset to work w/ SuSE 10.0, > and openSUSE 10.2. (Though not - at least directly - w/ 10.1) I have > been told that it has worked OTB w/ a fresh installation of 10.2. snip I can't find a Belkin wifi card with that model number. Can you find yours here <http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatSectionView.process?Section_Id=204037>? I'm familiar with Mandriva, not SuSE, so I can't tell you exactly how to do things the SuSE way - I'm sure others can. The basic distro-independent approach probably starts with running the command lspci in a terminal window, to see what hardware the OS has detected. The wifi card on this laptop is identified as: 02:03.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03) I couldn't get that card to work at all with earlier versions of Mandriva/Mandrake, but Mandriva 2007 with kernel version 2.6.17 does handle it well using ndiswrapper. Most wifi cards can be made to work with Linux by using the Windows 'driver' and a Linux tool called 'ndiswrapper'. Gradually, more wireless cards are getting either official Linux-native drivers from the makers, or working third-party ones. Whether or not you actually get ndiswrapper or any of the Linux wifi drivers included on the installation discs for SuSE, I don't know; with Mandriva, you only get non-GPL things with the paid-for or club-member version - but you can install them from on-line repositories if you haven't got them already. You may need to have 'Wine' installed to let the maker's Windows-executable driver installation file run in your Linux system so that you can extract the file ndiswrapper needs, if you haven't already got a Windows OS on the same machine with a driver installed that you can borrow for Linux. 'Xwine' is a nice GUI to Wine. -- -- ^^^^^^^^^^ -- Whiskers -- ~~~~~~~~~~
From: Garry Knight on 12 Jan 2007 18:04 Alec Ross wrote: > I'm looking for advice on a fairly simple way to get a WiFi installation > running. You didn't say what settings you'd tried. You also didnt say whether "the gateway" is an access point, a wireless router, or a PC with a WiFi card set up in Ad-Hoc mode. And you haven't said if you can reconfigure the gateway machine yourself or whether that's out of your hands. Assuming you *can* configure the gateway, I'd suggest you configure it (and your card) in the simplest way possible at first: set the ESSID, the mode, and the channel, but don't enable WEP or WPA. And try configuring it from the console first as it's faster than reconfiguring via a GUI each time you change anything. So start with something like this: iwconfig ra0 essid mystation mode Managed channel 11 Change the 'ra0' to the name Suse gives your card (could be wlan0 or eth1 or something like that: 'iwconfig' in a console will show you which device it is). If the gateway machine is in Ad-Hoc mode, use that instead of 'Managed'. Ensure they're both set to the same channel. Configure the gateway machine first then use iwconfig to configure the Belkin card. Once you've entered the iwconfig command, wait a second or so (watch the lights on the Belkin card if it has any) then enter just 'iwconfig ra0' (or whatever it's called) and make sure the result reflects what you entered on the command line. If it does, enter 'ifconfig ra0' (or whatever) to see if the card has got an IP address. Check that the gateway machine is configured to use DHCP to hand out IP addresses. If it isn't, you'll need to know the network address (something like 192.168.1.) and configure the Belkin card to use static IP. If the ifconfig command shows that the Belkin has an IP, try pinging the gateway machine, probably something like 'ping 192.168.1.1'. If that works, try 'ping 64.233.183.103' and if you see something like "64 bytes from nf-in-f103.google.com (64.233.183.103): icmp_seq=1 ttl=245 time=23.4 ms" then your route table is fine and you've got a connection to the Internet, so fire up a browser and check that you can download pages. If you can ping the gateway machine but not the Google server then your route table isn't set up properly (we can assume the gateway's NAT is working as you said it works in Windows). If you can ping the Google server but 'ping www.google.com' doesn't work then you need to configure DNS server IPs in /etc/resolv.conf. Try any of the above that you haven't tried yet and let us know how you get on. If you have a firewall ruleset in place (on the machine with the Belkin card, that is), turn it off temporarily then try again. If you've got an IP for the Belkin but you still can't get out to the Internet,do 'iptables -L' and ensure that you get an ACCEPT on all three tables. If you don't, report back here and I'll tell you how to drop your firewall completely. If you get to the point where you can get the two wireless devices communicating, try configuring the gateway machine to use a 64-bit WEP key: a 20-character string consisting of 0-9 and A-F. Don't rely on strings generated by entering passphrases as different manufacturers might use code that generates different keys for the same passphrase. Just make up a 20-character string yourself, e.g. 1234ABCD4321DCBA9988. Then try adding it to the iwconfig command: iwconfig ra0 essid mystation mode Managed channel 11 key 1234ABCD4321DCBA9988 If you get this far you can go back into yast and try configuring the card using the settings that worked. You've given so few details as to what you've tried so far and what happened when you tried it, so I might be wasting my time going over old ground here. Post more details and I'm sure someone will be able to help. -- Garry Knight garryknight(a)gmx.net
From: Garry Knight on 12 Jan 2007 18:33
Garry Knight wrote: > iwconfig ra0 essid mystation mode Managed channel 11 Forgot to say: after you do this and then check the result with 'iwconfig ra0', you need to activate the card with 'ifup ra0'. Of course, substitute 'ra0' with the actual name of your card. -- Garry Knight garryknight(a)gmx.net |