CentOS - Mar 2012 - Need help configuring wireless NIC

Hi everyone! :-)

Yesterday I managed to find a driver for my USB wireless dongle, and it is now 
correctly recognized by the kernel. However, I don't know how to configure
it.

The system-config-network opens up in text mode and is not very forthcoming (it 
lists ethernet, ISDN and modem as possibilities for configuring a new device). 
I don't know how to create an /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-whatever 
manually for my wireless card. NetworkManager doesn't see the device since
the
ifcfg* script doesn't exist. What am I supposed to do? (Google also
didn't
help...).

The device is listed by lsusb as:

# lsusb | grep 802
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 1286:1fab Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. 88W8338 
[Libertas] 802.11g

The libertas kernel module is loaded:

# lsmod | grep liber
libertas              105931  0 
cfg80211              164625  1 libertas
lib80211                4194  1 libertas

How do I find out the name of the device, and how do I create the ifcfg script 
properly?

Best, :-)
Marko

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 10:05 PM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> Hi everyone! :-)
>
> Yesterday I managed to find a driver for my USB wireless dongle, and it is
now
> correctly recognized by the kernel. However, I don't know how to
configure it.
How did you install the driver that you found?

What is the output of "/sbin/ifconfig -a"  does it list the wifi
device i.e. wlan0 ?

Do "ethtool --driver  <iface> "   to find the driver associated
with
your wifi network interface.

In my case I get the following output:

# ethtool --driver wlan0
driver: ath9k
version: 3.2.0-1-amd64
firmware-version: N/A
bus-info: 0000:02:00.0
supports-statistics: no
supports-test: no
supports-eeprom-access: no
supports-register-dump: no

Usuall the NetworkManager detects all the active network interfaces
and presents the devices.   In your case, I suspect the wifi device is
not being initialized.

HTH,
-- Arun Khan