On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 3:57 AM, Johnny Hughes johnny@centos.org wrote:

WRT wireless on CentOS, use NetworkManager to find and connect to networks ...

You can see if it is installed with the command:

rpm -qa | egrep "NetworkManager|wpa_supplicant"

If installed, the output is similar to this:

NetworkManager-0.6.4-8.el5 NetworkManager-glib-0.6.4-8.el5 NetworkManager-gnome-0.6.4-8.el5 wpa_supplicant-0.4.8-10.2.el5

If not, install with thsi command:

yum install NetworkManger* wpa_supplicant

The run NetworkManager from the command line.

You will see a NetworkManager applet beside the clock and you should be able to click it and pick a network.

Here are more details for how to setup NetworkManager:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tools/NetworkManager

Although not quite as extensive as the Fedora Wiki page, we have our own CentOS Wiki for NetworkManager at:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/NetworkManager

At the bottom of the page it says "There is nothing more to it !" :-D

Akemi

D Steward wrote:

...

OK ... this is silly

CentOS is an Enterprise distro and works great as a workstation. In fact, it is just as good as Ubuntu for a desktop. I would argue that a stable, supported for several year desktop is much better than a distro that upgrades every 6 months.

I've been starting to ascribe to your opinion.

For several years now, I've used CentOS on my servers and fedora on my laptop and desktop computer. However, F6 and onwards have been a bit flaky to install, with myriad little things going wrong which needed some TLC which no beginner could possibly do. And just last month when I went to install F8 on my laptop since F7 was EOL, the darned thing consistently segfaulted, despite the media passing OK, and my laptop being a bog-standard 4 year old HP corporate centrino-powered which is certified RH3-compatible. The only way I could do it was via the LiveCD :/ And then I had lots of little things going wrong on the install like vital rpms not being installed by yum which I had to do by hand since yum refused to even acknowledge they were available. :-X In 6 months time I'll have to do it all again to install F9 which by many accounts is a POS, freezing up for several minutes at a time for no apparent reason. So IMO, having used Fedora since about FC3, stability is getting worse - each version is more and more on the bleeding edge, too unpolished, too unfinished - definitely not suitable for beginners unless they have someone to hold their hand and pick up the pieces.

Ubuntu has its own problems. While it is slightly less cutting-edge than F9 and thus easier to install, the forums are huge and unwieldy. Every problem that one can possibly have, has already been answered by 100,000

• people in 10,000+ threads. The noobs outnumber the proficient users by

100 to 1, so finding the right solution to your problem is a real challenge in that 95% (my estimate) of the answers are wrong. So you'll spend a lot of time doing (and undoing) the advice given and backtracking from dead-ends.

In stark contrast, this list has one of the highest signal-to-noise ratios I have ever encountered, and the standard of contributors makes me feel inadequate :/ However, IMO, CentOS is still slightly too old to be used on a modern laptop, but probably fine for use on a desktop where standby and power conservation is less important. Stability of CentOS is outstanding, but still not perfect - I remember one problem from last year when I was using CentOS on a desktop and Evolution refused to start after an update. It needed a small tweak which was supplied on-list. But this problem came from upstream so also affected RedHat.

FWIW, I don't know what version of NetworkManager that CentOS uses, but the one used by F8 not only doesn't require wpa-supplicant to connect via WPA/WPA2 but many 'puters (such as my laptop) don't even need the network service running, since NW is now managing wired connections as well as wireless. It even integrates with OpenVPN now, although I am yet to try this.

---

CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

I agree with both posters 100% [especially about the Ubuntu Forums - sometimes bigger isn't always better :-) ] I started using linux with Red Hat 6.2 and I stayed w/ Fedora until around FC3, and that's when things started going downhill. I ended up being the classical distro-hopper for some time trying to find what would work for me, and I ended up using CentOS on my desktop workstation, and I use a small lesser-known distro called Foresight Linux on my Laptop - it's very up-to-date, has a unique and wonderful package manager and is far more stable than either Fedora or Ubuntu.

That combination works very well for me.

MHR wrote:

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 3:57 AM, Johnny Hughes johnny@centos.org wrote:

...

WRT wireless on CentOS, use NetworkManager to find and connect to networks ...

You can see if it is installed with the command:

rpm -qa | egrep "NetworkManager|wpa_supplicant"

If installed, the output is similar to this:

NetworkManager-0.6.4-8.el5 NetworkManager-glib-0.6.4-8.el5 NetworkManager-gnome-0.6.4-8.el5 wpa_supplicant-0.4.8-10.2.el5

If not, install with thsi command:

yum install NetworkManger* wpa_supplicant

The run NetworkManager from the command line.

You will see a NetworkManager applet beside the clock and you should be able to click it and pick a network.

Here are more details for how to setup NetworkManager:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tools/NetworkManager

The OP was wondering if this was possible from the live CD - I'm wondering if installing a (missing?) package is the right solution in /that/ case.

For (normal) CentOS, I have used a USB plugin wireless adapter on my laptop with excellent success, although it is not as easy as (okay, I won't name that other excuse for an OS) 1-2-3 - it takes some looking to find the whole enchilada, but it /is/ find-able.

you can install packages on the live CD for centos-5

Any suggestions on how to make this work under CentOS? I'd prefer to have CentOS on my laptop, to keep it the same OS as our servers. I don't want to learn two flavors of Linux...

Thanks, -at

Aleksey Tsalolikhin wrote:

Any suggestions on how to make this work under CentOS? I'd prefer to have CentOS on my laptop, to keep it the same OS as our servers. I don't want to learn two flavors of Linux...

Thanks, -at

It normally just works on most wireless cards (centos in general, not necessarily the live CD).

I will burn and boot the live CD on my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop and see how NetworkManager works here and get back to you.

What kind of laptop is it? Thanks, Johnny Hughes

Robert Moskowitz wrote:

I have had a terrible time with NetworkManager.....

Johnny Hughes wrote:

...

Aleksey Tsalolikhin wrote:

...

Any suggestions on how to make this work under CentOS? I'd prefer to have CentOS on my laptop, to keep it the same OS as our servers. I don't want to learn two flavors of Linux...

Thanks, -at

It normally just works on most wireless cards (centos in general, not necessarily the live CD).

I will burn and boot the live CD on my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop and see how NetworkManager works here and get back to you.

What kind of laptop is it?

I have pretty much given up on NetworkManager. I try it time to time after a clean boot, but most of the time, it will just NOT connect.

I am an 'old had' at modifying /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf, and I have simple scripts (for themost part) to run things. I have a script called wlan:

ifconfig eth1 up /usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant wpa_supplicant -B -dd -K -D wext -i eth1 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

That works well with the Intel card in my HP nc2400. The ifcfg-eth1 is fairly simple:

TYPE=Wireless DEVICE=eth1 HWADDR=00:1b:77:43:09:78 BOOTPROTO=dhcp NETMASK= DHCP_HOSTNAME=nc2400.htt-consult.com IPADDR= DOMAIN= ONBOOT=no USERCTL=no IPV6INIT=yes

I do find that the BOOTPROTO=dhcp does not 'work' and I have to run dhclient eth1 to get a lease.

If I get into a new area (did that a LOT these past couple weeks), I run /usr/sbin/wpa_cli and do a scan and scan_results to get the SSID, edit the wpa_supplicant.conf file, the a reconfigure within wpa_cli.

All works; all manual. But I clean everything out and NetworkManager just does not seem to work for me.....

That is certainly likely ... The state of wireless cards and firmware on Linux is not yet wonderful, some wireless devices work great others do not.

I have a Intel 2200 device (Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection) ... and it uses the ipw2200 driver. Other than the fact that I had to get the latest firmware from Dag's repo, it works fine.

I would certainly recommend trying NetworkManager first and if it does not work, then going the other route.

I was able to use the wpa_supplicant and its conf file to make this work too, but it was much harder and NetworkManager is great everywhere I go to get connected ... of course YMMV :-D.

Johnny Hughes wrote:

Aleksey Tsalolikhin wrote:

...

Any suggestions on how to make this work under CentOS? I'd prefer to have CentOS on my laptop, to keep it the same OS as our servers. I don't want to learn two flavors of Linux...

Thanks, -at

It normally just works on most wireless cards (centos in general, not necessarily the live CD).

I will burn and boot the live CD on my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop and see how NetworkManager works here and get back to you.

Just for the record, the LiveCD does not work with my Inspiron 6000 at all (some IDE/SATA issues when running the live CD) ... but this laptop works fine with a real install of CentOS-5.2. So, for most machines a working Live CD means CentOS should work, but not on all. Unfortunately, I can not test how NetworkManager works with this machine.

If you are installing your laptop from scratch, then I would recommend that you try installing CentOS-5.2 and see what happens.

Also, you can look in /etc/sysconfig/hwconf to see if CentOS sees the wireless NIC as a network card and what driver it is trying to use ... or if you need something like external firmware, etc.

What kind of laptop is it?