Re: Debian and Wireless on an IBM Thinkpad
On Sun, 22 Jan 2006 19:20:40 +0100, Leonid Grinberg wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I just ordered an IBM Thinkpad A21e. It has a (wired) LAN card, and 2
> PCMCI slots, but no wireless card. It also comes with Windows 2000 (a
> bug which will soon be squashed).
>
> Anyways, as I am going to be using this laptop with Wi-Fi, I decided
> to just buy a wireless card seperately. I have my eyes set on a Belkin
> card. However, I want to know some things about wireless with Debian:
>
> First of all, does anybody have any experience with Belkin? Any
> problems? I expect that I will have to use ndiswrapper and use Windows
> drivers. Will this mean I have to hold on deleting Windows, install
> the card and save the drivers to a CD or something similar?
>
> When the laptop can use both wired and wireless connections, how can I
> tell it something like: check the wired connection and if that fails,
> try wireless? How do I switch when it is on (I expect it is something
> like ifdown <WIRED> && ifup <WIRELESS>)?
>
> Also, how do I configure the wireless card to go to a certain hot
> spot? For example, if it needs a password. My school has a free Wi-Fi
> service without a password, but at home, my router is secure.
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> --
> Leonid Grinberg
If you're planning on a belkin and ndiswrapper, perhaps you should also
consider a open source driver that won't require windows executables at
some level. I've been using a Asus 11G with the rt2500 drivers on debian
unstable with a kernel compiled from the debian sources. There is no
firmware that you have to find and the card works very well for me.
There is probably any number of ways I've read about to do the switching
around; but I go to the simplest most of the time. What I do is have a
few stanzas in my /etc/network/interfaces file which will do a variety of
wireless settings whether I need a wep key or there is a login or its all
open. I tend to be at home a lot on wifi, at work with wifi, and at
coffee shops or starbuck's where I want to use tmobile hotspot since my
company buys me time there. To make a long story short, my
/etc/network/interfaces file looks like this:
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
#the etho interface 3com
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
iface home inet dhcp
wireless-essid xxxxx
wireless-key yyyyyyy
iface tmobile inet dhcp
wireless-essid tmobile
So, when I want to switch to another wifi network, I do an "ifdown ra0"
and then an "ifup ra0=tmobile". I get a dhcp managed IP address, etc. I
could just have easily have included my work static IP address assignment
here in another stanza because it uses really basic sets of stanzas like
any interface.
To do it all manually, you could use a combination of iwconfig and dhcp
or ifconfig commands depending on where you are coming from and going to
on the net. Something like "iwconfig ra0 essid xxxxx key yyyyyy" will
set up the card's essid and key and then a "dhclient ra0" will do the
rest.
There are probably more esoteric ways of doing this but since I am
wireless about 90% of the time these days, I just spent some time setting
up wifi stanzas. I've also used things like netenv, wifiswitch, and a
few others. I just strive for the simplest way of doing things and this
way seems pretty easy to me.
--
Michael Perry | Do or do not. There is no try. -Master Yoda
mperry@lnxpowered.org | http://www.lnxpowered.org
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