Wireless NIC+RH9

[ZiaTioN]

I just installed RH9 on a Dell (331 GL) laptop which has a built in wireless ethernet interface. However I have no network connectivity and when I issue the "ifconfig" command only the loopback interface shows up. I tried querying eth0 directly and it shows an eth0 interface but it has no address or netmask. This interface is not even the wireless interface though, it is the other built in modular RJ45 connector interface.

My question is what do I need to get my wireless interface to even show up as a valid interface first and then get it to get an IP address automatically from dhcp?

[Void Main]

Well, that would depend on if there is a driver for your wireless NIC or not. If there is you configure it just like any other network interface (pretty much). What model Dell do you have, more importantly what is the wireless chipset? You should be able to get more info from the "/sbin/lspci -v" command. I doubt you will have much luck with it but you never know. I have had great luck with the LinkSys WPC55AG PCMCIA card which will do 802.11A, B, and G. I have a couple of threads on it in the networking section, along with how to configure it.

[ZiaTioN]

Ok well I issued that command and got a list of what looks like device controllers or drivers. I see my gigabit ethernet interface (not the wireless one) and a broadcom tigon3 controller. So I tried to activate eth1 by using the gui app "Internet Configuration Wizard" and chose wireless and went from there.

Needless to say it says something about having to bind each interface to a physical one but the only one it likes is eth0 since that is the only hardware device it sees as of now. I guess I will have to read your tutorial on this and see what I can extract from it to apply here.

[Void Main]

Help me out here man. What is the model of your laptop, and your wireless chipset? The broadcomm would be the wireless chip but I need the actual chipset number. It would be cool if you could paste the output from an "lspci -v" into a post. Red Hat did not detect the wireless card so no amount of configuring the network GUI will get you anywhere. You have to have a driver for the chipset and the driver has to be loaded before anything can be done in the network GUI (or anything else for that matter). I suspect that there is no support for that card but I can research it if I can get the numbers from you.

[ZiaTioN]

Well I do not have the Laptop right now (is one my wife borrowed from her work) but it was a Dell Latitude D600. I did some research myself and discovered that a company called "Linuxant" makes a program called "DriverLoader" which from the sound of it is pretty much a Windows driver emulator.

It appears this app allows Linux to use Windows drivers for wireless interfaces. I downloaded it last night but have not had a chance to give it a go yet. If you want to research it and find another way please let me know. When she gets home I can give you the info you asked for (the output from "lspci -v").

[Void Main]

I am pretty sure that will be one where there are no open source drivers but it doesn't hurt to research. I saw the linuxant site before when I was first researching wireless for my laptop. I refuse to purchase the proprietary software and run Windows drivers on my Linux system. I just will not purchase hardware that does not support Linux. The LinkSys WPC55AG card has open source drivers (madwifi) for the Atheros chipset that take about 5 seconds to install so I spent the ~$60 and have a card that can do 802.11 A, B and G very nicely. You never know though, maybe some drivers are ready for the chipset you have in your laptop.

I know that a few months ago you were out of luck with the broadcomm chipset. It's strange though because the WRT54G LinkSys wireless router uses the Broadcomm chipset and the operating system it runs is Linux. You can download the source for the entire router OS from their web site with the exception of the wireless driver which comes in binary form. It would be trivial for them to at least release a Linux binary for the client devices since they already have that, don't know why they won't do it.

[ZiaTioN]

Yeah I also would not purchase a laptop for running Linux that had hardware that did not support it. The wife just borrowed the laptop from work and I loaded RH9 on it for our trip. We are going snowboarding in Mammoth and she needs the laptop for her C programming class while we are there.

I was able to get the modular ethernet interface up and running, it is just the wireless interface that is giving me issues. Internet connectivity is not exactly a mandatory thing but she may need to submit a programm while we are there.

[Void Main]

Cool. I used to do a lot of skiing. Snowboards were just starting to show up about the time I quit skiing so I've never ridden one. Good luck!