Bruce Dubbs wrote:
I've had some success with the wireless. I can now communicate via a
wireless card on a LFS system. I've got a built in card and an
external PCMCIA card, but I've only checked out the PCMCIA card for now.
I don't anticipate any problems though.
For the record, this is what I found out:
You have to have the right drivers installed! In my case, I needed
madwifi drivers. The kernel drivers needed fell into two categories:
bus and network card.
For the bus->PCCARD (PCMCIA/CardBus) support, I needed "CardBus
yenta-compatible bridge support and "16-bit PCMCIA support", but I also
think (not sure) I needed "Support for PCI Hotplug". More on this later.
In the Networking section I needed:
Generic IEEE 802.11 Networking Stack
I also enabled:
IEEE 802.11 WEP encryption (802.1x)
IEEE 802.11i CCMP support
IEEE 802.11i TKIP encryption
Is the ieee802 stuff driver-specific or is it needed for just about any
kind of wireless connection? I know my wireless driver (ipw2200) needs
this as well...
In device drivers->Network devices->Wireless LAN (non-hamradio)
Hermes chipset 802.11b support (Orinoco/Prism2/Symbol)
Hermes in PLX9052 based PCI adaptor support (Netgear MA301 etc.)
Hermes in TMD7160 based PCI adaptor support
Nortel emobility PCI adaptor support
Prism 2.5 PCI 802.11b adaptor support
Hermes PCMCIA card support
I'm not 100% all these are required. I suppose I could redo the kernel
build to make these modules and see which ones are needed.
In any case, on my system, when the cards are recognized by the drivers,
they show up in /proc/net/wireless and in a cryptic manner in /sys.
After that, using wireless-tools and ifconfig (I do prefer net-tools), I
can get the net cards up.
Overall, I think this is fairly complicated. I'm going to have to think
about what to say in the book. Right now, there seems to be two
packages needed: wireless-tools and madwifi drivers, but there needs to
be a section on configuration too.
Most of the complicated stuff seems to be in setting up the driver and
getting the device recognized. Once that's done, you can just treat it
like any other network device (plus the configuration with iwconfig). I
have a wireless setup with WEP, and I just have the standard {,B}LFS
network and dhcpcd bootscripts + one "wireless" bootscript (really just
a single command - /usr/sbin/iwconfig eth0 essid mynetwork enc
myencryptionkey - though I'm sure BLFS would want to install the
wireless-tools progs into / just like the rest of the base-level network
stuff).
Additional hardware-specific-info: the ipw2200 driver must be compiled
as a module. I seem to have lost the link that explained the reason for
this, but I believe it has something to do with the driver somehow not
being able to load the firmware if it's built in to the kernel.
Things I haven't explored yet: encryption/keys, scripting, hotplug/udev.
This is certainly a non-trivial topic.
-- Bruce
What about the info on WPA in this hint -
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/downloads/files/wpa-dhcpcd.txt ?
Of course, I only have a simple wireless setup with WEP myself so I
don't have any idea how well that WPA hint works...
Also, if you're going to add driver info (madwifi) to the book, perhaps
ndiswrapper should be added as well for hardware drivers that don't yet
have native linux versions. Though, I haven't had much luck with
ndiswrapper myself...in my experience it seems to lock up the computer
any time the wireless connection drops, but I wonder if this is typical
or just bad luck (or user error) on my part.
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