wireless on ibm thinkpad r50p
 

hello
I am new with Linux and now I need help to make my wireless work. I have Redhat9 with the kernel2.4.20. My wireless card is "11a/b/g Wireless LAN Mini PCI Adapter" and I have an IBM thinkpad R50p.
I googled a little bit and then I downloaded korinoco and madwifi, which are drivers that should work. But I don't know what I should do after that and I don't know if I have installed them rightly? when I go in the "internet configuration wizzard" he doesn't enumerate my hardware in the list of the wireless cards. The little green light on my laptop with the wireless symbol isn't on, but in windows it is on, even when I am not wireless in the internet. Perhaps I have to turn the wireless card on, but I don't know how.
the normal ethernet works without problems.
Does anybody can say me what I can do?

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Wireless Networking and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

After you compiled the driver you should insert them in the kernel. You can do this using the modprobe command like this:
If you don't know the module name you can search the wireless modules in your kernel tree. Your kernel is in /usr/src/linux. In there there should be a folder wireless or net with the modules in it then use the command. I think you can only try one module at a time so if one doesn't work you can remove the module with:
With iwconfig you can check your wireless extensions after you inserted the module. Simply type:
You can leave the interface out of it but sometimes it doesn't get listed if you don't specify it so you want to try eth0 and wlan0 as interfaces if it doesn't list anything at first.

If your card is recognized you can set the essid.
If you don't have any special security you can now run a dhcpclient to get the rest of the settings.
If you do have extra security it's probably best turning it off and see if it works and then add extra layers, one per time so you can easily check if things work.

Hope this helps.

I installed the madwifi driver, which should work for my wireless card.
then I made these commands:
Why does it doesn't connect. I don't understand everything that he says

Can you try with dhcpcd? I never got dhclient working properly myself. "dhcpcd ath0" should do it unless you have a wep key set. Unless you have a few other non-default options set in your router (but I guess you know about them then) it should be able to pick up the settings after you set the essid.

I installed now dhcpcd an tried. then I have to wait a long time, and he makes nothing. He writes even no error message.
I have a little light of the wlan in my laptop, this light is turned on, when I load the module ath_pci and when I run dhcpcd ath0, the light goes out.


I have to make a vpn connection to use the internet, but I don't think that my problem comes because of this. Because in Windows, I have to connect first normally, and after this only I connect with the vpn client. Is it in Linux the same, or could this be my problem?

The network which I want to use isn't protected, but after connecting I have to use a vpn-client to suspend the ip-restriction, so my problem isn't the vpn

my wlan works now. I started from the begin and did exactely what is written on this homepage: http://www.linuxiens.net/howto/mdk10lap.html
Now when I start my laptop I am immediately connected :)

dhcpcd only as root
 

Everything works now, but I can only run dhcpcd as root. As a normal user he says: How can I give a user the authorization to use dhcpcd?