[WYLUG-HELP] wireless lan notebook card installation

[Shaun Laughey]

On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 10:00 -0700, lists at mungewell.org wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 08:01:21PM +0000, Mike Goodman wrote:
> > Hi, Folks,
> > 
> > I just bought a cheap, hope it will make me cheerful, Cable & Wireless
> > 802.11g LAN Notebook Card (£19.99 from Comet's Birstall branch) for my
> > Acer Aspire 3002LC laptop running FC4. The chipset is rt2500 which I had
> > to download the driver for separately and it seems to have installed OK.
> > 
> > The card's lights come on at boot up but no signal as far as I can see
> > and at network restart command I get:
> > 
> > Bringing up interface wlan0:
> > Determining IP information for wlan0:. . . Failed
> > 
> > Where do I start? Is there any more info I can offer to help with a
> > diagnosis?
> > 
> 
> Google ;-)
> 
> Here a link to a SuSE how-to on that card. It seems that the rt2500
> drivers use the name 'ra0' for the interface name which is rather stupid
> (in my opinion).
> 
> http://home.bb-zone.com/index.php/Ralink_RT2500_Linux_Howto
> 
> Your have to change the scripts that expect the wireless interface to be
> called 'wlan0' to make calls using 'ra0'
> 
> You could just type the commands yourself, I would expect a suitable
> sequence would be:
> 	ifconfig ra0 up
> 	iwconfig ra0 essid <your_essid>
> 	iwconfig ra0 key <your_key>
> 	iwconfig ra0 mode managed
> 	pump -i ra0 
> 
> Cheers,
> Simon

ifrename in wireless-tools, at least on Debian, lets you rename the
interface to something a bit more useful like wlan0, it just needs the
mac address then you should be fine with the rest of the FC tools
expecting wlanX.

Shaun Laughey.