CentOS - May 2006 - CentOS 4 and laptop and wifi works

I want to buy a laptop and install CentOS 4 on it
and have the wifi work when I'm done.
    (Hoping for reasonable specs: 2GHz, 40GB drive,
1/2 to 1 GB RAM, CD-ROM, light and thin, 13 or 14
inch screen....)

Any recommendations?

HP/Compaq nw8240 works a treat - only thing that I have not got
working is the onboard modem and the wifi cut off switch, wifi and
everything else works a treat with Centos 4.2 and 4.3.

There are even instructions on the HP site for installing RH on it.

Ian

On 25/05/06, jim stockford <jim at well.com>
wrote:
>
>     I want to buy a laptop and install CentOS 4 on it
> and have the wifi work when I'm done.
>     (Hoping for reasonable specs: 2GHz, 40GB drive,
> 1/2 to 1 GB RAM, CD-ROM, light and thin, 13 or 14
> inch screen....)
>
> Any recommendations?
>
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>

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On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 10:25:43PM -0700, jim stockford
wrote:
> 
>    I want to buy a laptop and install CentOS 4 on it
> and have the wifi work when I'm done.
>    (Hoping for reasonable specs: 2GHz, 40GB drive,
> 1/2 to 1 GB RAM, CD-ROM, light and thin, 13 or 14
> inch screen....)
> 
> Any recommendations?
Anything without an Atheros based Wifi. Mine is Intel IPW2200, and works
nicely. Everyone I know with atheros based is having problems.

- -- 
Rodrigo Barbosa <rodrigob at suespammers.org>
"Quid quid Latine dictum sit, altum viditur"
"Be excellent to each other ..." - Bill & Ted (Wyld Stallyns)

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--- jim stockford <jim at well.com> wrote:
> 
>     I want to buy a laptop and install CentOS 4 on
> it
> and have the wifi work when I'm done.
>     (Hoping for reasonable specs: 2GHz, 40GB drive,
> 1/2 to 1 GB RAM, CD-ROM, light and thin, 13 or 14
> inch screen....)
> 
> Any recommendations?
Shop around but ensure :-

- Your chosen manufacturer has linux support. (IE
linux.manufacturer.com or www.manufacturer.com/linux
has relevant stuff on it.)
- Look at the manufacturer's forums for users
experiences.
- Some models are certified for RHEL
- If you need to madwifi or ndiswrapper are open
source projects that provide drivers for wireless cards.

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Finally have a Centos install on my HP4010 worth working on, and put my 
Atheros PCI card in instead of the Intel (Intel was always flaky with 
XP, Atheros not).

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.
>
> <http://madwifi.org/wiki/Releases/0.9.0> - they put out the first
> release based on madwifi-ng 2 days ago. 
At first when I say the -ng designation, I was skeptical, as this 
normally refers to pre-11n MIMO stuff.   But looking at the wiki, I see 
it is more than that.

I also see that on http://atrpms.net/dist/el4/madwifi/ the version is 
0.9.1 which I hope is the -ng code.  Further I might think that I can 
use:  http://dl.atrpms.net/all/madwifi-0.9.1-24.el4.at.i386.rpm even 
though this is RH 4?

After I install this driver, do I run Kudzu to get the card recognized?

BTW, I will be at the IEEE 802 plenary in San Diego next week (heading 
to IETF in Montreal this week), and will talk to Chesson and other of my 
Atheros colleagues about progress.  Now that I actually need his help on 
this!

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.
>>
>> <http://madwifi.org/wiki/Releases/0.9.0> - they put out the first
>> release based on madwifi-ng 2 days ago.
>
> I have been running madwifi-ng from cvs for some time now. I suspect 
> it is
> simply a matter of finding some time to come up with the magic 
> incantation
> to get it to work. 
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?

Ralph Angenendt wrote:
> Rodrigo Barbosa wrote:
>> Okey, that is a 802.11ab (11Mbps) chip. My experiences were only with
>> 802.11g (54Mbps) chips.
>
> Ermm. 802.11a is 54Mbps ... 
The world of 802.11 is more complex than those of you that do not write 
specs should care about.

Yes, 11a is 54Mb.  So is 11g at 2.4Ghz.  There is lots written on the 
pains of frequencies, modulations, the FCC, other users of said 
frequencies (like military), and other national boards (like Japan) that 
points to why things are as they are in 802.11 world.


My 'rule-of-thumb' for 11g vs 11a is:

For general use,  11g is better than 11a for coverage and material 
penetration.

For multi-occupancy environments (shared office buildings and 
apartments) the additional channels with 11a easy balance against the 
pain of negotiating, or just fighting over use of the channels.

Also home entertainment and particularly music will benefit from 11a 
over 11g.  And 11n over either...

Tom Diehl wrote:
> 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."
I did dig that all out.  It just threw me at first.  11-ng carries a lot 
of political IEEE 802 baggage.
>
>> 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.
But so far, I have only done ONE build of my own.  I have my docs from 
that time and now I have to put it all together to see if I can do it 
for real.

The files are dated 5/31/06 which is after the madwifi-ng
release.
>
> 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.
All of my APs here have some level of encryption.  I was one  of the 
contributors to 11i; you know, eat your own dogfood.
>
> In order to get wpa to work I had to configure wpa_supplicant and 
> start it
> by hand after the card is inserted.
Sigh.
>
> 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
Passphrase will work for some, but I need PEAP-MSCHAP.
>
> ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
> ctrl_interface_group=wheel
>
> network={
>         ssid="my_accesspoint"
>         psk=8f12345672d565a2611c29dfaea6abac90432112341562e49f3c8801bf
> }
I will make note of this..
> 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,
yes!