Well since CentOS, in the name of stability never has any latest package installed, it is very difficult to do small things in it which is a matter of few clicks in some other distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu.
However since I had CentOS installed on my laptop, I had to find a way to get my wireless up. So I started searching different ways to do it. First I had to get the system to detect my wireless. For this I followed the wiki given in CentOS, http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/Wireless#head-d0f09f4e13e1089355527862718bbf7548a5a64a
After this I installed latest wireless-tools package which I downloaded from here, http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html
Then I started my wireless using the following command,
ifconfig wlan0 up
After this I tried to find the available wireless connections which I could connect to. This can be obtained by the following command.
iwlist scan
After I found the wireless connection which I used to connect usually, I checked its features. However in CentOS did not give any option for me to enter the configuration in its wireless configuration.
Hence after digging in internet for quite some time, I found out that I need to install wpa-supplicant package . So I downloaded the package and installed it as given in its install file.
After that I needed to put the wireless configuration in the wpa-supplicant.conf file. Luckily I had saved the configuration details that I used in Ubuntu. This I used along with trial and error method to get the right configuration.
You can get the explanation for each variable using “man wpa-supplicant.conf”. Following is the content of my wpa-supplicant.conf file.
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=wheel
network={
ssid=”ABCDEF”
key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
eap=PEAP
identity=”abc@xyz.com”
password=”password”
phase2=”MSCHAPV2″
}
Once wpa-supplicant.conf is configured, start wpa-supplicant connection using the following command:
wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -d
Voila. Now you have your wireless connection detected and working properly. Enjoy.
