[PlanetCCRMA] Installing wireless card

[Joseph Zitt]

I've gotten much farther on installing my Netgear MA401 PCMCIA wireless
card under Planet CCRMA's RedHat 7.3. To do so, I ended up unpacking the
kernel source RPM to a partition with enough space (using rpm2cpio),
then unpacking the Netgear-supplied pcmcia-cs and linux-wlan-ng tar.gz
files and "make"ing them according to their instructions, pointing them
to the right place to find the kernel source. It appears that I turn out
not to need to recompile the whole kernel (*whew*).

Trying to connect at the local coffeehouse with free wireless access, I
see that I'm able to at least get the card to see the network:

[jzitt at gimel jzitt]$ /sbin/iwconfig wlan0
Warning : Device wlan0 has been compiled with version 13
of Wireless Extension, while we are using version 12.
Some things may be broken...

wlan0     IEEE 802.11-b  ESSID:"fertile grounds"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.422GHz  Access Point:
00:30:AB:20:D4:72
          Bit Rate:200kb/s   
          Link Quality:58/100  Signal level:95/100  Noise level:2/100
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

But any attempt to actually reach anything tells me "Network is
unreachable".

Through more digging around, it appears that I need to set up the
connection via the redhat-config-network tool. I'm running the version
that's up at Planet CCRMA:

[root at gimel jzitt]# apt-get install redhat-config-network
Reading Package Lists... Done
Collecting File Provides... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Sorry, redhat-config-network is already the newest version.
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 removed and 13 not upgraded.
[root at gimel jzitt]# rpm -q redhat-config-network
redhat-config-network-1.0.0-1
[root at gimel jzitt]# 

However, it doesn't do wireless; the last entry in its changelog is:

* Wed Apr 17 2002 Trond Eivind Glomsrød <teg at redhat.com> 
  - Turn off wireless. It doesn't work with all modes, all cards
   and you can't edit IP settings after the initial attempt

It appears that wireless was reactivated not long afterward, in
versions available from Rawhide:

* Wed Jun 12 2002 Harald Hoyer <harald at redhat.de> 1.1.2-1
  - lots of i18n and migration changes
  - wireless reactivated

Those versions have a heap of dependencies, which make me leery of
trying to hunt them all down and install them outside of the Planet
CCRMA apt system.

Any chance a newer version could be added to the Planet for RedHat 7.3?

-- 
| jzitt at josephzitt.com                      http://www.josephzitt.com/ |
| GPG: A4224EFA                         http://www.mp3.com/josephzitt/ |
| == New book: Surprise Me with Beauty: the Music of Human Systems  == |
| Comma / Gray Code / VoiceWAVE Silence: the John Cage Discussion List |