Wireless Lan Card Driver for Red hat Enterprise 5

[abdulsamad]

Dear all,
I am new to Linux ,Can any one tell me how to install my wirelless Lan Card ,I am using Lenovo 3000 N200,and its wireless Lan Card is ":00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)"

[waterhead]

This should be fairly easy to get working. But first, we need some information. Read through the thread linked to below, and post the information that it describes how to find.

Wireless Setup - Start Here

Don't forget to give us the drivers that are loading (lsmod), and the dmesg/firmware info. Also provide the output of these two commands.

ifconfig

iwconfig

[reed9]

Note that for this card, you need both the driver and the firmware. No idea if the firmware package is in Red Hat's repositories, but you can get it here.

This card works out of the box in almost every distro, the exceptions that I know of being Red Hat, CentOS, and Debian. For Debian, it's because the firmware is non-free - they do include the driver. For the others, it's because they are Enterprise distros, and not really designed for laptops. My understanding is that wireless drivers are disabled in the kernel by default.

[waterhead]

My understanding is that wireless drivers are disabled in the kernel by default.

I think that I may have been the source for that bit of misinformation. I am booted into my RHEL 5.3 installation, and I checked my kernel. There are actually quite a few wireless drivers enabled. The kernel version is 2.6.18-128.1.1.el5-i686, and here is what I found concerning that Intel card.

<M> Intel Wireless WiFI Next Gen AGN
[*]   Enable Spectrun Measurement in iwlagn driver
[ ]   Enable LEDS features in iwlagn driver
[*]   Intel Wireless WiFi 4965AGN
[*]   Intel Wireless WiFi 5000AGN
<M> Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG/BG Network Connection
[ ]   Enable RF kill support in iwl3945 drivers
[*]   Enable Spectrum Measurement in iwl3945 drivers
[ ]   Enable LEDS features in iwl3945 driver
[ ]   Enable full debugging output in iwl3945 driver

It looks like the LED part of the driver isn't enabled. Also the kill switch (on/off switch) isn't enabled.

My /lib/firmware folder is completely empty! I guess you will just need to install the correct firmware to get it working. To see what version it is looking for, enter this command.

dmesg | grep firmware

Edit: You will also need to add a wireless connection manager to Red Hat I recommend installing Wicd.

wicd - home

The only problem I found is after boot. You have to tell Wicd to rescan before it will detect the local wireless networks.