From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Toshaan Bharvani
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 4:24 PM
To: centos@centos.org
Subject: Re: [CentOS] wireless laptop configuration

> On Aug 19, 2008, at 5:04 AM, Sorin@Gmail wrote:
>
>> I'm using a 3Com 3CRWE154G72 IIRC, which according to the hwconf's using the
>> prism54 driver/firmware/whatever.
>>
>> Would I maybe be better off reinstalling the whole shebang and have the
>> wifi-card inserted from start in order for the centos installer to
>> see it
>> properly from the beginning?
>
>
> before you do that, open a terminal, become root, and run
> /usr/sbin/kudzu (while the wireless card is installed). that's the
> program that does hardware detection; it may be able to sort out your
> issue.
>
> -steve
>
or if kudzu for some reason doesn't cooperate (which is always on my system)
become root
run : /sbin/modprobe prism54
run : dmesg | tail
and read whether it just says it has loaded the module (single line) or
detected will output a wlanX statement and you are in business

Isn’t it implied that since ”prism54” is listed in /etc/sysconfig/hwconf for the wifi-card that the module has been loaded already? Or is this some of the magical stuff that sometimes doesn’t happen for whatever reason? 8-)

/etc/sysconfig/hwconf is the file kudzu creates when of all detected hardware at startup and it related this hardware with drivers in the kernel
but certain drivers are modules in the kernel, wich need to be loaded manually or later when the system is already running
this can be done by method 1 explained here above or adding them in /etc/modprobe.conf which makes it load the modules at startup
you will need to add the line (if it is not yet there) :
alias wlan0 prism54
you can check whether the module is loaded with : /sbin/lsmod | grep prism54

Excellent explanation. Thx.