NetGuido

Many new cards, like other new components, do not have GPL-compatible drivers provided by vendors or drivers developed by the open source community are not yet mature enough to be included in the kernel. Therefore, these drivers are provided as modules and some of them will eventually be added in future kernels when they are completed. One of the most famous drivers is ipw2100 [3] to map Intel PRO / Wireless 2100 as part of the Intel Centrino ® technology that is installed on many laptop computers. In this section, the author will introduce the driver installation ipw2100.


Firstly, you need to download the source package driver and the firmware on the project site, www.netguido.com. After making sure your core is relatively new and built with the support modules, hotplug firmware, and wireless LAN as stated above, unpack the source package:
FITNESS: / usr / src # tar-zxvf ipw2100-1.0.1.tgz
Then go to the source directory to compile and install it:
FITNESS: / # make usr/src/ipw2100-1.0.1
FITNESS: / usr/src/ipw2100-1.0.1 make install #
After installing the modules, it indicates that you need to install the firmware:
Do not forget to copy firmware to / usr / lib / hotplug / firmware / and have the
hotplug tools in place.
As if the message: unzip the firmware in the directory setup and installation procedure is complete. Now you can enable the module ipw2100 by:
FITNESS: / usr/src/ipw2100-1.0.1 # modprobe ipw2100
You can also add some arguments for different configurations. For example, the argument ifname can specify the name of the interface:
FITNESS: / usr/src/ipw2100-1.0.1 # modprobe ipw2100 ifname = wlan0
Thus, the interface will be named wlan0. For other arguments, you can read the documents included in the package source driver ipw2100.
Driving other cards
Unfortunately, some cards have no driver for Linux or it does not work for different reasons. However, this does not mean that you can not use Linux. At least, you NDIS wrapper [1].
Most WLAN cards for desktop or laptop computers support Windows 2000/XP, which manages the support of wireless network via a standard interface called NDIS. Thus, the drivers for such cards usually support NDIS. Therefore, we can create a sub-layer adapter for the driver and let it run on Linux as if it was Windows 2000/XP, which leads us to project ndiswrapper.
In this section, the author will install ndiswrapper network card for a wireless Netgear 121 per instance. First, we will download the ndiswrapper since the project site and prepare the http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net NDIS driver for Windows. The ndiswrapper is a kernel module as well as some tools. You should build and install:
FITNESS: / usr/src/ndiswrapper-0.11 make install #
Then you can load the Windows driver in the sub-layer adapter
FITNESS: / usr/src/ndiswrapper-0.11 # ndiswrapper-i ../wg121/WG121V200/ndis5/netwg121.inf
where the file. inf is the NDIS driver for Windows. After installing the NDIS driver, you can see
FITNESS: / usr/src/ndiswrapper-0.11 ndiswrapper-# l
Installed ndis drivers:
netwg121 driver present
Congratulations! The installation procedure is complete.
Authentication
If you access a wireless network in a public space, the wireless network may require that you authentication methods for security reasons. Most authentication methods for wireless networks are based on IEEE 802.1x (EAP) and IEEE 802.11i. The methods based on the EAP are currently the most popular.
There are many authentication methods based on the EAP, such as EAP-MD5, EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS, EAP-SIM, LEAP, and so on. Linux users can use xsupplicant provided by the Open1x project [4] to access a network requires authentication based on 802.1x. In this section, the author will use the LEAP protocol, which is supplied by Cisco corp. as an example. Note: the fact whether the protocol can be supported depends on the map and the pilot, for example, even if your xsupplicant is properly installed and configured, you’ll be unable to access the network because your card or driver does not support it .
You can download xsupplicant from the project site, http://open1x.sourceforge.net, and install it. Then modify the configuration file / etc / xsupplicant / xsupplicant.conf. Here is an example for LEAP.
# example of / etc / xsupplicant / xsupplicant.conf
# for LEAP protocol
All network_list =
# the list of networks to access
default_netname = default
# The default Access Network
first_auth_command = <BEGIN_COMMAND> dhclient% i <END_COMMAND>
# The command before authentication, which is usually used to get some info from
# The Network
logfile = / var / log / xsupplicant.log
# log file
myssid # here is your network id, may be listed in the network list
(Type = Wireless
SSID = <BEGIN_SSID> myssid <END_SSID>
All allow_types =
Identity = <BEGIN_ID> ability <END_ID>
eap-Leap (
username = <BEGIN_UNAME> ability <END_UNAME>
password = <BEGIN_PASS> passwd <END_PASS>
) # setup for Leap
LEAP is a simple method of authentication but there are many other configurations for other methods. Please refer to the examples and document xsupplicant.