Wireless loonix on MSI Mega 180

Wednesday, January 26th 2005

I write this on a MSI Mega 180 DeLuxe. It stocks a WLAN chip (you know, IEEE80211b and whatnot), which for the driver has been opensourced. So, clever guys are working to include it, but the driver is not yet part of the mainline linux distribution. This means that it's not included on installation sets from various distributors. Which is sad when wireless's all you've got.

So what, you say?

I'll tell you. I am blessed with the opportunity to try out three current linux distributions on behalf of a Norwegian linux mag, and I'm about to tell you how to set up this driver under the different flavors.

For all variants, you obviously need the driver source. I'm writing this using the 1.2.1 version, if there's something newer you should probably use that, but in that case this guide obviously won't matter any more, so go do something else.

First off, the bloody French:

Mandrake Powerpack 10.1 Official.

  • Make sure you install the kernel-source package, and the gcc package and all their dependencies.
  • Untar the archive, enter the Module subdirectory and say make && make install
  • Go to the Mandrakelinux Control Center, find Network and Internet and add a new device. Make sure it's wireless. Enter the info. Don't worry if things don't seem totally all right yet.
  • Reboot. I know, it's silly to go rebooting, but Mandrake won't notice the driver if you don't.
  • Return to the Control Center, and activate the device. This one did it for me.

Turning over to the land of the brave:

Fedora Core 3

  • Make sure you've got the kernel source package and the gcc package, but Fedora installs them by default, so you've probably got it.
  • Untar the archive, enter the Module subdirectory and say make && make install
  • Don't go running for the beach just yet. First, stick the following info into a new file called /etc/sysconfig/ifcfg-ralink: 
 DEVICE=ra0
 ONBOOT=yes
 BOOTPROTO=dhcp
 USERCTL=no
 PEERDNS=yes
 TYPE=Wireless
 IPV6INIT=no

Why this, you say? Because Fedora wants all networking devices to be called ethN, the rt2400 driver people don't (their device is called ra0), and then you and I are left to sort the mess. So we trick Fedora to think she configured ra0 by herself.

  • Enter System Settings, select Network, create a new device, select Wireless and follow the wizard. Make sure you enter the network name (ESSID) and channel.
  • Activate the settings and pass the popcorn

Lastly; the krauts:

SuSE Personal 9.2

Yea, I'll get back to this.