Monday, 30th May 2005
Setting up wireless on Fedora Core 3
Suprisingly support for Linux on laptops is sparse. Often there arent the required drivers or the drivers aren't released early enough. As a result it is often frowned upon when attempting to install Linux on a laptop.
But not to be discouraged by this i put my best foot forward towards running linux on my Compaq Presario V2030US Laptop (see picture) . I initially got Red Hat 9 to install perfectly. Everything worked except for wireless. And being a portable device, not having wireless access was a huge problem. I googled around for solutions. At that time (about 5 months back) drivers for intel centrino chipset on linux were hard to find. After a couple of frustrating days searching, i gave up and went the route of running VMware and hosting a Linux VM on my windows XP install. This stop-gap solution actually took me through the entire spring semester (althought i must admit i didnt use it much during the time). However the itching desire to have a linux distribution working natively on the computer led me to do some more searching for solutions.
At this point there were already lots of equally anxious and frustrated users who were struggling to get everything right with their wireless connections and the internet was flooded with their frustrations. The solutions that had begun to prop up at the time, all required to have a higher kernel than the one i had for Red Hat 9. And Since red hat no longer supports Red hat versions. I even tried the latest version of Fedora Core ( 3 at that time). The problem about a latest version is that it is not as well documented as say an earlier "stable" version. Besides the older the distribution version, more likely some one somewhere online would have posted a solution to the common "gotcha's". A quick attempt at getting wireless setup using Fedora Core 3 proved futile and i didnt pursue it for too long owing to time constraints. Again i procastinated to finishing it during summer and was to be contend with running FC3 on VMWare.
Well it is officially summer and i cant keep the desire of running linux (WiFi enabled n all) on the laptop. I was sure that by now some one would have come up with an easy solution to the problem and indeed they had. A quick google search threw up a lot of solutions, mostly outlining the same steps. So i decided to go for it on my Fedora Core 3 install.
Below is the steps needed (for my reference at a later stage if needed)
First off you need to make sure you have the following packages installed, if not you'll need to install them prior to following this tutorial:
Downloading
First of all you need Fedora Core 3 with the 2.6.9-1.667 or later kernel
Wireless Tools (v27 or later)
You need get the IPW2200 driver (use the stable version)
You also need binary firmware packages. (Make select which firmware version you would like to download based on the version of the IPW2200 driver you are using)
Installing
Once you have the packages listed above do the following as root:
#tar -zxf ipw2200-0.12.tgz
#cd ipw2200-0.12
#make
#make install
Now for the firmware package, still as root do the following:
#mv ipw2200-fw-2.0.tgz /lib/firmware
#cd /lib/firmware
#tar -zxf ipw2200-fw-2.0.tgz
#rm ipw2200-fw-2.0.tgz
Scipt to load driver at startup
#cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
#vi ifcfg-eth1
Now insert the following lines:
DEVICE=eth1
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
TYPE=Wireless
#
# Wireless configuration
#
# Mode=Managed or Ad-Hoc... ours is not Ad-Hoc
# ESSID is the SSID of the network
# Key is the WEP key
# This is needed only if the network you are trying to access is secured
MODE=Managed
ESSID=[peace]
KEY=[6DE523C7144D1C386E7C7A50DE]
% modprobe ipw2200
% ifup eth1
Thats its. Wireless should be up and running. Have fun.
Update
Since my successful attempt at configuring wirelss access on Fedora Core 3.I shifted my attention to solving the Sound Card Detection problems (Well Known FC3 problem) and also the display resolution (pathetic 800 X 600).And since have crashed the linux install. The frustration has led me to opt for the more inviting Debian package (especially after reading excellent reviews on it). Although i wont be waiting for the latest release to come out. Infact as we speak i'm downloading the DVD image for debian using jigdo !!!
Posted by Nikhil on Monday, 30th May 2005 in TechnoBabble