My son’s computer upstairs is wireless. I set this up nearly two years ago, and it definitely took some trial-and-error (and merchandise returns) to get it right. I am not sure how much things have changed since then (it doesn’t look like much), but here is what I did anyway:
- I installed a Planex PCI 802.11g card – lspci shows 00:0c.0 Network controller: Intersil Corporation ISL3890 [Prism GT/Prism Duette]/ISL3886 [Prism Javelin/Prism Xbow] (rev 01).
- Googling revealed that I needed the isl3890 firmware to use with the prism54 kernel driver, so I downloaded the 1.0.4.3.arm firmware file.
- I renamed 1.0.4.3.arm to isl3890.
- I copied isl3890 to the following locations, making any non-existent directories along the way:
- /etc/firmware/isl3890
- /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/isl3890
- /lib/firmware/isl3890
- I installed iwtools via urpmi: urpmi wireless-tools (this provides iwconfig).
- I then restarted the network service: service network restart
- iwconfig showed a wireless card on eth0.
- I edited /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and added in the following lines:
WIRELESS_MODE=Managed
WIRELESS_ESSID=<my-wireless-router-SSID>
WIRELESS_ENC_KEY="restricted <my-wireless-router-key>" - I then restarted the network service: service network restart
- Running dhclient eth0 then got a DHCP IP address from the wireless router.
That was it. It has been stable and reliable since Mandriva 2006 came out. Previous versions of Mandrake had some weird timeout issue where I could not copy large files between computers without the wireless card going to sleep – updating fixed that.
wireless routers are very necessary nowadays because we do not want so many wires running around the home -’*