munky.net

Now that I’ve been using my linux laptop with its new wireless connection, I wanted a way to switch between configurations for home (specific ESSID with encryption) and school (various ESSIDs with no encryption). I struggled with this for awhile using the system-config-network tool, which shows up in xfce as “Network Device Control” under the System menu and used to be called redhat-config-network in the RedHat days. However, I was having trouble getting multiple profiles to work, and the documentation wasn’t helping.

Finally I figured it out with the help of this guide on LinuxPlanet. Apparently settings in the default “Common” profile actually affects all profiles, which is why I was unable to get my Common (home) and School profiles to maintain separate settings. The key is to ignore the Common profile and create discrete new profiles for each actual set of settings you want to use.

(more…)

I’m posting this with the hope that someone in a similar situation might come across it on a Google search and find some helpful information.

This evening I managed to get a cheap ($10 after rebates at Fry’s) Buffalo WLI-CB-G54L wireless PCMCIA card working in my aging Sony Vaio PCG-F540 (Pentium III) laptop, which I just upgraded to Fedora Core 3. This card is based on the Texas Instruments ACX 111 chip, which lacks any sort of official Linux driver support from the manufacturer. Although there is an open-source project to create a native Linux driver for this device, that driver in its present state does not support WEP encryption, and I wasn’t about to run an unsecured wireless network. My only other option was to use the ndiswrapper package, which basically allows binary Windows XP wireless drivers to work in Linux. Amazingly enough, it ended up working.

(more…)