Hi All,

Well I did my first install of linux every and I gotta say I'm having fun. I installed Fedora 7 on a HP nx9420 and everything went smooth except for my video which once I found the right post I got working as well as my internal wireless card. I am having one problem with my wirless card.

I installed the ipw3945 using yum and it was good to go except I can't put it into monitor mode. Reading online it says that in the make file you need to uncomment the code that allows it to monitor and then compile it. Well how do you do that using yum? Or where does yum place the files it installs and can i go to that directory and change it/recompile it? - Remember I am REALLY new to linux but still computer literate.

Also what's a good gui program to view surrounding wireless nodes and if they are encrypted or not? Is there one that if you try to connect it prompts for a wep/wpa key? I find network manager lacking

You can't make the changes to the driver yum installs, you need to get the source code for your wireless card and compile it from scratch, usually only if you want to apply a patch to allow injection. It should be able to monitor the way it is with the driver yum installs. You just need to install the right software to do the monitoring, aircrack-ng is the one you should install, should be able to install it with yum. Do some reading here, and also check out the forums.
As far as having a gander at all APs within range, issue command as root:
Replace eth1 with what is appropriate for your card, to see which device is your wireless card, issue command as root:
As far as a GUI, I can't recommend any for Gnome desktop as I use KDE in my laptop, all I do is install knetworkconf and network-manager to link up, I have kwifimanager installed also but never use it, allot of people rave about it only because it is similar to most Windows GUIs, I don't link up to the same AP every day so I just go through knetworkconf as I still have to use it the first time even with kwifimanager. If I want to auto connect upon re-boot for an encrypted or non-encrypted network, I just add "auto eth1" as the first line to the entry for the last AP I connected to in /etc/network/interfaces for my wireless card, as the entry for your wireless interface in that file will get changed with every different AP you link too and the key and ESSID are written there also.

Also, I don't use Fedora on my laptop, I use something better called "Debian". Anyway, I just had a peek at Fedora mobile to see if you may have missed the firmware as you never mentioned it. Apparently there are issues with the ipw3945 and mac802.11 that comes with the kernel. Just wondering if you might of stumbled on any of this info.
http://fedoramobile.org/Members/opse...5-on-fedora-7/

Hey thanks for the info, told me what I needed to know!

So you like Debian? This was my first install but I downloaded the dvd iso for Fedora and Debian 40R1. On my Fedora I installed KDE and Gnome, gotta say I've been more impressed with the gnome so far. I'm defiantly going to try Debian as well. Why do you like it better?

Because Debian is super fast, and the software repositories contain more software than just about any other distribution in .deb binaries which means there is less need to install software from source.
Debian allows me to do a base minimal installation and only dress it up with what I want it to wear. My current VMware Debian client is comprised of well under 500 packages with KDE desktop and all the tools I need for my work, non of which had to be installed from source.
I just installed Fedora again the other day as a client in VMware and tried to thin it out as much as possible, it still installed about 860 packages, I was not happy to see packages get installed that I omitted. I've had a rough time with Fedora and it's mostly due to the fact I'm on dial up and Fedora can have an average of 12+ hours a week or more of update downloads. And if I go to install a package, I have to wait a half hour or so for it to download repo data, then if I go to install another package an hour later, sometimes, same thing. And some updates break Fedora, I've not had that happen yet with Debian testing since I had it for about ten months now. Both are on the "bleeding edge technology" side, Debian testing can be a week or more behind Fedora, which probably explains why it appears to be more stable, it appears the Debian team spends more time fine tunning before pushing the updates out.
Yes, Fedora's blue balloon desktop and catchy login splash are nice compared to Debian's, but that don't cut her over here.
I have both of them installed in a stand alone installation outside of VMware and Windows also. But in the VMware in Windows, running Debian seemingly does not affect speed and performance in either Windows or Debian. Running both Debian and Ubuntu does give slight noticeable lag, but still tolerable. Running Fedora alone with Windows has way more noticeable lag, so, it don't get used too much.
I'm considering removing all Linux stand alone installations, because Debian inside of Windows is the best configuration I've had so far. I've had Debian as host and Windows as client in VMware also, but it was not as peppy as the other way around. And because I work on large files and produce large files and folders that can take 4 or 5 hours to process, performance matters.