muskedc

Pls tell me the steps i need to perform in installing 802.11a/b/g under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5



Regards
muskedc

xantham

Well, I can't give you any Red Hat specific help, but I can give you some things to google for if that will help. The basic procedure for getting these working under Linux is to first set up the drivers for the your particular device, then show linux how to connect to your router.

The first thing you want to do is find out the chipset for your particular card and then find out whether or not linux supports it natively. If you type lspci from a command line and examine the output, it should tell you what kind of card you have somewhere near the bottom. It will show up as a network controller. Just because it has a certain company's name on the card doesn't mean you'll be able to find the driver by searching for that card. But if you search for the name of your card, usually you will be able to find what chipset it has, and then doing a search for that will usually turn up what kind of driver linux uses for it, if any. There are only a few chipsets used by a lot of different manufacturers, and to confuse the issue even more, manufacturers will use different chipsets with different cards. I have a 3com officeconnect pc card which uses a prism chipset. Therefore my driver under linux is prism54.

Once you've found and installed the driver, the simplest way to find out if linux recognizes and uses that driver for your card is to boot up and from a command line type lsmod, then examine the output for whether or not the operating system loaded the driver for the card. Also, depending on what you have you probably have lights on it. If they light up at some point after booting, then that's usually a good sign that the driver is working for your card, but just because they don't light up doesn't mean it isn't working.

Next, you need to set up the network interfaces to use the card and connect to your router. Both Gnome and KDE have gui's that do this pretty well. Those are another way to tell if your card is recognized, btw, as they will only show up in the gui's if the drivers are loaded (I think? <g>) It's possible you may have to hand edit a configuration file. I hope not, though. Look around. There are several gui's for linux that are designed to simplify this process, if you don't already have one on your system.

One last thing, if you are one of the unlucky people who has a card with no native driver for linux, there is a program called ndiswrapper that will let you use the windows drivers for it.

Good luck and hope this helps.

Regards,

Keith

muskedc

Thanks for the help. I learnt a lot from that.

xantham

That's not a problem. Good luck.

Regards,

Keith