I was trying SchoolOS on my laptop which is a derivative of Ubuntu 9.10. However my first problem with it was that my wireless driver was not working. I had known from my previous experience that I would have to probably install b43-fwcutter to get it working. However when I tried to install it, I found out that it was already installed. I still removed the package and installed again but still it did not help. So I googled for any help. I found a forum post where in I was suggested to try the packages given in http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php . I downloaded the 32 bit package and followed the Readme.txt given along with the package. Within 2 minutes my network driver detected the wireless device and I was able to surf using my wireless connection.
Tag: wireless
September 8, 2010
April 7, 2010
How to enable Wireless on CentOS?
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.
