Tech Journal Back to Tech Journal

How do I setup my Wireless Netowrk USB adapter?

The following steps are what I did to set up my wireless USB Airlink+ adapter. There's nothing specific to that model, other than the use of the atmel driver, and you're be suprised at how many adapters make use of their chipset. (see: http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net/howto/howto-3.html)

  1. First of all, many systems will crash when the driver loads if usb-uhci is used. So I'd recommend switching to uhci.o.
    1. Edit /etc/modules.conf and replace the line
      alias usb-controller usb-uhci
      with:
      alias usb-controller uhci
    2. Either reboot, or unload the usb-uhci and then load uhci.
  2. Untar the atmel driver
    tar -xjvf <atmel_driver>
    (You can get the driver from http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net/)
  3. make config
    answer N to all except: "build USB" and all "do you want to build RFMD" questions.
  4. make all
  5. make install
  6. modprobe usbvnetr
  7. read /var/log/dmesg to verify install (see MAC address is good) also: use iwconfig to check existense
  8. connect to access point: [assuming the interface is called eth2, and the ESSID of the access point is NETGEAR]
    iwconfig eth2 mode Managed
    iwconfig eth2 essid NETGEAR
    
  9. Use iwconfig - if you see the access point's MAC (e.g. the MAC address of the wireless router), you're connected.
  10. Set the IP address of the interface:
    ifconfig eth2 192.168.1.150 up
    
  11. Check it using ping, and the rest of the network testing tools.
Last updated on 2004-02-10 14:00:00 -0800, by Shalom Craimer

Back to Tech Journal