24/03/2006
who said wireless networking in linux is hard ?
I had for over 2 months a friend’s left over laptop at my house. It’s an old amd K6 333Mhz with 64Mb RAM. Useless ? maybe yes maybe not…I just wanted to see what I coulld do with it…
I’ve booted it with DSL and I had a nice desktop to work on…now what ? A few days ago I had started preparing a new linux based access point for our local wireless network in the city I study. It had 2 Winstron CM9 802.11a/b/g cards and one netgear MA311 802.11.b card. I also happen to have an orinoco gold 802.11a/b/g pcmcia card I was given some time ago as a gift (even though I don’t own a laptop, yet). So why not mess with these two ? I plugged in the pcmcia in the laptop and it was instantly recognized. Then I just added through ifconfig the IP that I wanted the wireless card to have…and wow! I was associated instantly with the remote linux based AP in the next room. That was easy 🙂 It’s probably a good time now to install dhcp to that AP too so I won’t even need to add an IP manually 🙂
So all I had to do was give an IP…no drivers…nothing. The card was automatically recognized, and here’s the lsmod part about it:
root@ttyp0[root]# lsmod | grep ath
ath_pci 31508 1
wlan 48520 1 [ath_pci]
ath_hal 111792 1 [ath_pci]
By the way…this card is NOT recognized in windows XP without drivers. And if you happen to forgot the drivers cd while travelling…you are probably doomed.
Good job linux people 🙂
Filed by kargig at 22:44 under Linux,Networking
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