Networking with Slack
 

I have a slack 10.1 setup w/ the 2.6.8.1 kernel on my laptop. I currently don't have any problems with it except for one: I have a 802.11b D-Link DWL-650 rev.P card w/ the Prism3 chipset(I believe).

When hotplug starts the light on the card turns on but other than that I don't see anything that would suggest a driver for it has been loaded.

I have absolutely no clue where to go from here. I tried running lspci but didn't see anything that even remotely looked like a pcmcia driver. I ran netconfig as the slack site suggested but failed to find an option that would probe for new hardware to integrate. I have hit a dead end and don't know how to proceed. Any suggestions?


Thanks in advance for the help guys :)

Doing a search in google produced:
http://support.dlink.com/faq/view.as...ral%20Wireless

It looks like this device is supported by the linux-wlan project. You can find packages of it in the "extra" section of the packages.

What do you mean the "extra" section. I don't even see a packages section. :(

Although I don't have a problem building from source, pkgs are a lot cleaner if you ask me.

Also when grabbing the source do I need the tar.gz.asc file to untar the source? Just want to know before I burn a CD.

OK tried installing it by following the readme but being the fool I am I forgot to compile and install pcmcia-cs. So I did that w/ pcmcia-cs even though the "make config" line of questions didn't ask for the source of pcmcia-cs. I tried restarting with the script in the readme but the script wasn't there.

Then I decided what could it hurt and "/etc/rc.d/rc.wireless restart". It gave me a bunch of weirdness about trying to set the ESSID to "Set Here" which I assume means I didn't config something that I needed to.

What am I missing here? I'll go take a crack at editing the rc.wireless script but I don't understand how the wlan drivers were integrated at all. The wlan scripts went into /etc/pcmcia and /etc/wlan. Should I have put them somewhere else? I'm so friggin lost in the dark it isn't funny :confused: .

Well I just rebooted and logged into root expecting to dredge through the rc.wireless file but instead found my system attempting to connect to the first AP it found. First I stared for a second in amazment. Then I quickly rebooted into windows to ask a quesion:

Anyone know how to set it up to where I can select an AP to connect to rather than it randomly trying to connect to someones WEP encrypted wireless network(I live in an apt complex)?

I'm really happy except now I have no clue as to how to make the card do what I want. Thanks to any who can help :)

$ man iwconfig

iwconfig wont work with the wlan-ng drivers. Not sure how I'm supposed to change APs etc. on the fly.

The wlan-ng package should come with the tools you need to set the card parameters. Have a read through the documentation and/or the web site and there should be an explanation of how to configure the card.

Well at the very least I am currently connected to the net. I dug through the docs and didn't find anything I hadn't already tried. Then I went and configured /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf. Hopefully that will keep my card accessing the same AP over and over until I change the SSID.

Thanks for the help guys.

Hi,

If you want to set different AP;

iwconfig wlan0 essid myAP

Actually, in the README for wlan-ng, it tells you how to setup different conf files for each wireless network that you want to attach to, i.e. 'linksys' at home and 'spyingonyou' at work. Just make copies of /etc/wlan/wlancfg-default and change the 'default' after the '-' to whatever the network name is. Then edit the renamed file for the specifics of that network.

I have the exact same card, and was a royal pain until I compiled the wlan-ng driver myself....Works great now

I configured that conf(and created a conf for the AP that I want to connect to).

What I want to do is get it to connect to a SPECIFFIC AP. It's been driving me nuts all day that it's hit or miss when it decides what AP to connect to. Any idea on how to tell wlan-ng to connect to a specific set of SSIDs and leave the rest alone? I guess what I really need is a comprehensive list of all the stuff that wlanctl-ng can do. I've tried looking through "wlanctl-ng commands" but it doesn't explain much beyond the name of the command.

Also iwconfig will NOT work with these drivers. If I could use iwconfig I would probably be connected to the network I want to be.

Is there a way to make it connect to the AP I want it to or will it always pick whatever?

Addin: editing rc.wireless.conf did absolutely nothing for me.

That is because the /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless script is not for PCMCIA (16-bit) cards. For those cards, you set your options in /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts.

The /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless(.conf) files are for PCI and PCCard devices only. A PCCard device is 32-bit, and is essentially a PCI card which fits into a PCMCIA slot. The "old" 16-bits PCMCIA cards are very different.

Eric

Consider trying WiFi-Radar. It is a brilliant tool for sniffing and selecting/connecting to wireless networks.
If you set it up to use sudo, you can even use it as user without having to log in as root.

ARG! Wifi radar looks sweet except for the fact that it uses iwconfig. I need a tool that will use wlanctl-ng.

cwwilson721: Could you explain to me what conf/opts files you edited/created and what wlanctl-ng commands you use to connect to the AP you want to? Or is your AP in a house? I guess that's part of my problem is I'm in an apartment and the AP I want to connect to is surrounded by 2WIREXXX APs.