Redhat Wireless Card Configuration Introduction

Wireless Internet is the focus of network development in recent years. Wireless internet has become the preferred way for many home and office environments because of the lack of physical cable restrictions. Many traditional environments based on wired LANs are migrating to wireless, which is very urgent for drivers under Linux. As we all know, for the new product of the wireless card, Linux driver support is always slow, most of the drivers of the network card are only Windows drive, until now there are few additional Linux drivers. This has caused a great obstacle to the popularization and development of Linux in China.

First, the introduction

These two days, according to the needs of the laboratory, undertook the transformation of the existing network to increase the wireless AP project. As the laboratory has long been engaged in unix/linux research and engineering projects, there are a large number of Linux hosts need to solve the problem of wireless internet. For this reason, the author has been in a wide range of search Linux can support wireless network card, but also on Google has looked at countless data, including hardware manufacturers, third-party open source support, and so on. But this information seems to be a lot, but in fact it meets my needs can say very little, there are mainly the following questions:

1. The existing article describing the wireless network card support scheme under Linux is mostly about the way of using NDIS wrapper. This package only supports more than 2.6 cores and is not supported for kernel version 2.4.20. And most of the machines in the laboratory using the traditional Redhat 9.0, the core is precisely the 2.4.20, if you need to change the core is more trouble. In addition, it uses the reuse Windows XP-driven approach, from which the binary instructions are analyzed to translate into Linux drivers, but the conversion rate is not 100% perfect, and the driver for Windows xp-based is not 100% available.

2. NDIS wrapper needs to recompile the kernel, which makes the installation process cumbersome, and many of the applications that are already running do not allow the kernel to be compiled at all. Therefore, it is best to drive the module, direct loading can be used. The author believes that the driver should be used to simplify as much as possible, more disgusted with the need to recompile the kernel of any application.

3. The wireless network card is mostly Pcmica, USB, for the standard PCI is relatively small. And we need to support most of the PC, the use of PCI card is the most convenient, but also the most cost-effective.

4. The wireless card in the market is not necessarily good to buy, the models are relatively old, or widely used abroad in the domestic market is very rare. And for the current market, the most popular tp-link, D-link and other common network cards, but it is difficult to find whether or not to support a clear answer, often answer is very vague, so that the reader has no way to judge, and no energy to buy a network card to do the experiment.

In view of the above analysis, I tried the Madwifi driver (http://www.madwifi.org), using the Tp-link 550G 802.11G network card, which is the best to buy and also the cheapest (of course fake). This network card is the representative product of Tp-link 802.11g, is the standard PCI interface, with Tp-link domain exhibition function (802.11G effective distance from 30, 40 meters extended to the farthest 108 meters, is tp-link a major unique selling point). The reason why the use of Tp-link, but also mainly because it is cheap, good to buy, for our clatter to buy dozens of of the scale is very economical. If you change the D-link, then each network card will be one times more expensive.

The following story does not do what the principle of analysis, fully follow the steps already achieved. Therefore, the reader is required to have the most basic knowledge of Linux driver configuration. The operating system version selected is Redhat 9, and the kernel is 2.4.20. For more than 2.6 cores, madwifi drivers are also perfectly supported, and readers can find similar upgrades in http://www.madwifi.org.