[CentOS] Re: CentOS 4 and laptop and wifi works

Sun Jul 9 13:32:23 UTC 2006
Tom Diehl <tdiehl at rogueind.com>

On Sun, 9 Jul 2006, Robert Moskowitz wrote:

> Tom Diehl wrote:
>> Ralph Angenendt Wrote:
>> 
>>> Tom Diehl wrote:
>>> > Have you succeeded in getting wpa encryption working with the 
>>> Atheros/madwifi
>>> > drivers??
>>> >
>>> > My madwifi card works just fine with no encryption but I cannot get it 
>>> to
>>> > work with the wpa encryption turned on.
>>> 
>>> You need the madwifi-ng driver to use WPA, if I'm not completely wrong.
>>> Having no WPA enabled access point to test it on, I couldn't say if it
>>> works, though.

Well actually the -ng designation is gone now.

If you read the announcements here: http://madwifi.org/ you will find this:

"Note: June 2006, "madwifi-old" has been deprecated, it is no longer supported.
All users are encouraged to use an official release tarball, which contains a
stable snapshot of svn trunk."

> If I should not be using the RH drivers from 
> http://atrpms.net/dist/el4/madwifi/, is there someway for you to share your 
> builds?

I have been successfully using the madwifi drivers from http://madwifi.org/
for several weeks. When I last looked, the stuff at atrpms was out of date.
That may be corrected by now but it is easy enough to get the latest driver,
so it makes sense to build your own.

It turns out that if you take one of the daily tarballs from subversion and
run "rpmbuild -ta tarball_name" it will build a driver that "just works".
All I had to do to get it to work with no encryption was plug in the card.

In order to get wpa to work I had to configure wpa_supplicant and start it
by hand after the card is inserted.

In my /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file I have something like the
following:

# Run the following command to add another wpa network to the system:
# wpa_passphrase YOURSSID yourpassphrase
# mtd 27 May 06

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=wheel

network={
         ssid="my_accesspoint"
         psk=8f12345672d565a2611c29dfaea6abac90432112341562e49f3c8801bf
}

Having said all of the above I must confess that, I have never actually tried
any of this on a centos system. My laptop runs FC5 so things might be slightly
different.

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Tom