HOWTO: Bringing Up Wireless Cards (continued)
I recently recorded a video over at The Linux Learning Station on using iwconfig, ifconfig, and dhclient to bring up a wireless network card. The process in the video is the process that I’ve always followed because, thankfully, both my PCMCIA cards are usually recognized by most distros.
My process basically involves setting the essid and WEP password on the card and then bringing it up. In order to ensure that it comes up every time I boot, I make a little script and use update-rc.d to put it in the proper init directories.
What I didn’t know was that I could put the essid and WEP values into the /etc/network/interfaces file rather than writing a script. Reader Kurtis put me on to that little gem and when I took a look at my interfaces file, it explained a lot to me about the difference between distros that pick up my card and distros that don’t.
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback# The primary network interface
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
# wireless-* options are implemented by the wireless-tools package
wireless-mode managed
wireless-essid driveon
wireless-key1 8FB06577D76E84EE6D4233651D
I’m currently running flight 5 of Kubuntu Dapper Drake and it picked up my network card during install. It asked me for my essid and WEP key and lo’ and behold - this is where it stored it.
So, instead of writing a script to bring your card up, you may also want to try putting the correct values into your interfaces file (if your distro doesn’t do it for you during install) and see what happens.
Thanks, Kurtis!
Tags: linux, wifi, wirelessRelated Stories
POSTED IN: How To
6 opinions for HOWTO: Bringing Up Wireless Cards (continued)
Dennis
Mar 27, 2006 at 6:16 pm
Jon
How do I download the HOWTO video ? I like to watch them when I am off line on the train to work.
Jon
Mar 27, 2006 at 9:35 pm
Hey Dennis
The best I can do is email them to you. They’re 30 meg each though.
I don’t have webspace for this project since there’s no way in hell I’d be able to afford the 300GB of bandwidth each month, so there’s no place for you to download them from.
Drop me an email if you want me to send them to you.
Carlos
Mar 28, 2006 at 4:50 pm
How about using Google video to upload your videos?
Jon
Mar 28, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Hey Carlos,
I did try that but there’s a couple of things that bug me about that. First, I can’t seem to get any audio out of Google Video on my Linux box. I don’t know why….
Second - it takes them a day or two to approve the videos. That kind of bugs me.
I think that the time has come (with this project and many others that I have) for me to buy my own box somewhere. That’s what I’m looking at now. Shared hosting is becoming limiting for me.
Derrick
Oct 12, 2007 at 5:27 pm
I recently recorded a video over at The Linux Learning Station on using iwconfig, ifconfig, and dhclient to bring up a wireless network card.
jon,
if you wouldn’t mind I’m new to linux and am trying to transition from XP professional to fedora7. I can’t get fedora to see my linksys
wmp54gx pci card. I would really appreciate it if you would not mind emailing me these videos above. My email will accept them. If you have any question for me just let me know.
Thanks,
Derrick
Doug C.
Jan 6, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Help!
First of all I love your site its great, and very helpful. I am very close to getting a Dynex wireless PCMCIA card to work. Dynex is from BestBuy and after looking at the chipset its a Broadcom BCM4318 for which I have found drivers and by using ndiswrapper I have managed to get Linux to recognize it. I can set paramaters to my wireless network under iwconfig as wlan0 and can get ifconfig to see it as well. The only problem is I cannot see to get the device to an up state
When I type ifconfig wlan0 up I get the following error:
SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such file or directory
I also do not get any lights on the card as I would expect if Linux does not have it in an up state yet I know it sees it because it shows the correct mac address in both iwconfig and ifconfig.
I appreciate your help, as I am sure you are aware by now I am new to Linux but have been in the PC world for 15+ years and am trying the feasibility of Linux.
Thanks I have been working all weekend and have gotten this far and see the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.
Doug
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