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              Outbreak Magazine Issue #12 - Article 11 of 18
           '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~'


// Wi-Fi on SuSE 8.0
//
// by dual_parallel
//
// http://www.oldskoolphreak.com

SuSE 8.0 is a phenomenal distribution.  The install is pleasurable, it's 
stable with X from PIIs on, the included applications are solid, KDE 3.0 
handles as well as it looks...  Wireless integration, on the other hand, 
seems to have been an afterthought.

To contrast, wireless in Red Hat is painfully simple (see "Wi-Fi on Linux 
Made Easy" in Frequency 24 - http://www.hackermind.net).  Red Hat has an 
Internet Configuration Wizard and lists numerous Wi-Fi card drivers when 
setting up an Ethernet interface.  When using YaST2 (SuSE's Yet another 
Setup Tool), there are no Wi-Fi drivers listed although many cs (card 
services) modules are included in every install.  So, as you can guess, vi 
will be used to manually edit configuration files [1].  But which ones?  
Do not fret.  All will be told.

The goal of this article is to give the reader a straight-forward, 
step-by-step methodology for setting up wireless using an Orinoco card on 
SuSE 8.0.  Beyond that, helpful wireless applications and their installation 
will be discussed. A fresh laptop install of SuSE 8.0 will be used.

First, as on the test laptop, insert your Orinoco NIC and install SuSE 8.0.
For testing, the "Minimal graphical desktop" was chosen.  In fact, all of 
the wireless setup can be performed sans X.  After installation is complete, 
log in as root and launch YAST2 by typing "yast" in an xterm.  Choose 
Network/Basic and then Network card configuration.  Hit Launch.  Add a PCMCIA 
network card as eth0 and set it up for DHCP or your static IP.  It's ok that 
it's listed as an unknown card.  Hit Finish.

Now on to vi.  Open /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia and set

PCMCIA_SYSTEM="External"

Then, in /etc/sysconfig/hotplug, set

HOTPLUG_NET_DEFAULT_HARDWARE=pcmcia

Next, open /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.conf and change the following entry:

card "Intersil PRISM2 Reference Design 11Mb/s WLAN Card"
   manfid 0x0156, 0x0002
   bind "orinoco_cs"
  #bind "prism2_cs"

Be careful.  There are three "Intersil PRISM" entries.  Choose the one in 
the middle. The next file is /etc/sysconfig/network/wireless.  Here is how 
the important variables are set, assuming your box will be a node within an
infrastructure network:

WIRELESS_MODE="managed"
WIRELESS_ESSID="any"
WIRELESS_CHANNEL="6"
WIRELESS_RATE="auto"

Leave everything else blank and set the channel as appropriate.  That should
be it.  Reboot your machine (from testing, "/etc/init.d/pcmcia restart"
doesn't quite do it) and you should be on your network.

With your wireless Internet access working, it's time to install added
wireless functionality.  The Wireless Tools package from Jean Tourrilhes 
will allow you to view and manipulate information from the Wireless 
Extensions [2]. The latest version (25) can be found at:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/wireless_tools.tar.gz

Save the tarball to your home directory and unpack it with:

tar -xzf wireless_tools.tar.gz

"cd" to the newly created directory and, despite all of the warnings in the
INSTALL file, "make" and "make install" will work just fine on SuSE 8.0.  
After compilation, reboot your computer and iwconfig, iwevent, iwgetid, 
iwlist, iwpriv, and iwspy will be copied to /usr/local/sbin.  Then simply 
"su -" to use these new wireless tools.

Finally, you may want a graphical client manager.  KWiFiManager is a KDE 
3.0- only client program that monitors connection quality and allows for easy
interface configuration.  KWiFiManager 1.0.0 and documentation can be found 
at http://kwifimanager.sourceforge.net/.  To compile and install KWiFiManager, 
the following packages must be present on your machine:

Development/Libraries/KDE -> qt3-devel, qt3-non-mt
System/GUI/KDE -> kdebase3, kdebase3-devel, kdelibs3, kdelibs3-devel

Enjoy wireless on this fine distro.  Share anything that you learn and send 
any suggestions or corrections to the author.  And stay away from SuSE 8.1.  
Peace.

[1] http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2002-Apr/3040.html

[2] http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html