Posts Tagged ‘wireless’

I just purchased a refurbished NETGEAR USB wireless adapter that was reported to work through the Linux Wireless project. Getting it to work should be a simple issue of downloading the firmware and moving it to /lib/firmware. However, this is reported for the version 1 and I have version 2. I followed Green_Bean’s instructions for ndiswrapper which worked. To simplify things I created a package for Debian/Ubuntu on the Oojah Repo!

NOTE: It is common practice for manufactures to change the chip sets of a wireless adapter and not change the model number (especially with USB devices). This can cause a lot of headaches for Linux users who, like me, do their research find a compatible device to find out they have a new subversion with a chipset that either doesn’t work or requires the slightly messy busyness of using ndiswrapper with windows drivers.

If every you find your self needed to connect to a wireless network with command line only, this is how you do it (all commands are done with root permissions).

First identify your wifi adapter:

ifconfig

you should get a read out of network adapters. Wireless is generally wlan0, but sometimes might be eth1. You can tell it is wireless with a top line readout that looks like this:

wland0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:”"

now you have identified your wifi adapter lets scan for wireless devices.

iwlist wlan0 scan

Now if there are any wireless devices in range you will have a print out of them. What you are looking for is to see if access is encrypted and the ESSID which identifies the network apart from the others. The read outs will look like this:

Encryption Key”on
ESSID: “MyNetwork”

now that you are armed with the information you need:

iwconfig wlan0 essid MyNetwork
ifconfig wlan0 up
dhclient wlan0

Alternatevely, you can use dhcpd inplace of dhclient. this is for an open network. I have yet to figure out how to access an encrypted network with the command line.