USB Wireless G Adapter

rodm13 · 11-14-2005, 03:01 PM

I have a HWU54G Hawking Mini-USB Wireless adapter and I don't know how to get it working with my Slack 10.2 box. I just got it the other day for a desktop that is isolated from the router enough to prevent the possibility of a wire, and I tried messing around with ifconfig and iwconfig, but due to never having configured wireless, I had no luck. I also grabbed the drivers from Hawking's site and compiled/installed them (make, make install) and it apparently finished without errors, but the adapter still doesn't work. I have checked it and it works fine with Windows XP and it is detected as a USB 2.0 WLAN device as seen in the KDE Info Center. Any help would be appreciated!

Alien Bob · 11-15-2005, 08:47 AM

I think that the KDE info Center just reads the product information that it gets from the PCI ID.
You can check if the card is detected by running

Code:

/sbin/ifconfig -a

to see if there are any network interfaces present that you don't know about, or

Code:

iwconfig

to look for available wireless cards.

Then, if your card driver is loaded, and armed with knowledge about your Wireless Access Point's (WAP's) ESSID and possibly WEP key, channel, etc.. you can write the information into /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf and attach the PC to the network.

The hard part will be when the card is not detected by Slackware because there is no driver present for it. In that case, you will have to start looking for a driver, based on the information that you read on the card or it's packaging material. You might get lucky with the ZyDas driver based on what I read in this topic:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...25#post1765125

Eric

rodm13 · 11-16-2005, 01:09 AM

Thanks, that got it working great. After I got a working driver and messed around with my routing table and iwconfig/ifconfig, it works. One last thing, though, do you know how to make it automatically load during boot? (Like which rc. file I should put my commands in?) I have to type (as root) to get it working:

Code:

ifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.3
route add default wlan0
route add default gw 192.168.0.1

Thanks

Rod

Alien Bob · 11-16-2005, 03:46 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by rodm13
Thanks, that got it working great. After I got a working driver and messed around with my routing table and iwconfig/ifconfig, it works. One last thing, though, do you know how to make it automatically load during boot? (Like which rc. file I should put my commands in?) I have to type (as root) to get it working:

Code:

ifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.3 route add default wlan0 route add default gw 192.168.0.1

Thanks

Rod

Modify the file:

Code:

/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf

with these lines. You may choose something else for the VARIABLENAME[1]=.... that I use in the below example, like [0] or [2], whatever value is unused in the conf file:

Quote:

IFNAME[1]="wlan0"
IPADDR[1]="192.168.0.3"
NETMASK[1]="255.255.255.0"
USE_DHCP[1]=""
DHCP_HOSTNAME[1]=""

and further down in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf make sure it says

Code:

# Default gateway IP address:
GATEWAY="192.168.0.1"

After doing this, you can either reboot to test, or run the following (and then there is no need for a reboot):

Code:

/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 wlan0_restart

PS: if you need to set any wireless parameter for your card, you can add it to /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf as well, like this example to set the ESSID to "MY_AP":

Quote:

...otherstuff[1]=....
WLAN_ESSID[1]="MY_AP"

These are the same variables you use in rc.wireless.conf but with the string WLAN_ prepended to them. See the /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf file contents for more examples.

Cheers, Eric