Wireless Laptop?

Fri Jan 14 01:51:47 UTC 2005

On Fri, 2005-01-14 at 01:11 +0000, Angus wrote:
>
> I am sorry for my ignorance, but I am new to Linux, how do I do what you have
> stated above

Then you are not ignorant, only new.

When I say something like "the output of 'lspci' ...", I mean to run the
command 'lspci' in a terminal emulator, [Applications | System Tools |
Terminal].  You can read the manual to 'lspci' by running the command
"info lspci" in the terminal (also try "info info", and "man man"; the
"info" command will look for an info document first, and if not found,
will then look for a man page).

Here's what I see on my laptop:

8<-------------------------------------------------------------------->8
karlheg at journeyhawk:~ $ lspci
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82852/855GM Host Bridge (rev 02)
0000:00:00.1 System peripheral: Intel Corp. 855GM/GME GMCH Memory I/O Control Registers (rev 02)
0000:00:00.3 System peripheral: Intel Corp. 855GM/GME GMCH Configuration Process Registers (rev 02)
0000:00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corp. 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
0000:00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corp. 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB 2.0 EHCI Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 83)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801DBM LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801DBM (ICH4) Ultra ATA Storage Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 03)
0000:01:00.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ6912 Cardbus Controller
0000:01:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev 80)
0000:01:02.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
0000:01:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82801BD PRO/100 VE (CNR) Ethernet Controller (rev 83)
8<-------------------------------------------------------------------->8

You'll see in there two "Ethernet controller" lines, one for the
"Atheros" wifi card, and another for the Intel PRO/100 wired ethernet
card.  So my laptop needs the madwifi 'ath_pci' driver from the
'linux-restricted-modules' package, and the 'e100' driver from the stock
kernel.

The 'hotplug' package takes care of loading those automatically.  To
read the hotplug packages man pages, run:

dpkg --listfiles hotplug | grep 'man.*\.gz'

... to see what they are, then:

info hotplug

... to read it.  (You man also like to read "info grep".)

Also see the documentation to 'iwconfig', 'ifupdown', 'interfaces', and
'ifconfig', for a lot more detail about network configuration.  You
don't have to read them all today, but eventually should.

The 'iwconfig' command, on my laptop, returns:

karlheg at journeyhawk:~ $ iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

sit0      no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11  ESSID:""
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
          Bit Rate:0 kb/s   Tx-Power:50 dBm   Sensitivity=0/3
          Retry:off   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=0/94  Signal level=-95 dBm  Noise level=-95 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

So you see that it knows there's a wifi interface available, thus, the
driver module for that wifi card has been loaded.  When the driver is
not loaded into the Linux kernel, that interface will not show up.

The reason my madwifi (Atheros) interface is named "wlan0" rather than
the default "ath0" that it would normally have is because I have
installed "ifrename", and created an /etc/iftab file with:

 wlan0   driver ath_pci

... in it.  I did that so a script I wrote can work no matter what wifi
driver is actually in use...  the interface will always be named
"wlan0".  You don't have to do that part, as long as you have the right
interface name in /etc/network/interfaces.

 iface wlan0 inet dhcp

... is all that's required for an open AP, with no encryption.  If you
need WEP or WPA, configuration is slightly more involved.

Someday we will have an easy-to-use tool for wifi configuration!