Setting up a Compaq Armada 1700 Laptop, Fedora Core 4 and MSI CB54G2 Wireless 11G.

[andy@vicnet]

This is a short success story about setting up Fedora Core 4 on a compaq armada 1700 (pentium 266 with 168Mb ram).

Its been a long time since i used the Yggdrasil distribution, and have spent most of the intervening time in the windows world so i guess i've slipped back to newbie status. Anyway, my primary goal was to setup a laptop with linux, and with wireless networking to enable use elsewhere in the house (my wife was starting to forget what i looked like!) and to get back up to speed with linux again.

The wireless adapter i have available to me is a MSI Wireless 11g Cardbus CB54G2 and i have a linksys wap54g (v2) access point. The CB54G2 has the RT2500 chipset.

I tried various non-fedora distributions including Knoppix 3.6, 3.9, slackware 10, ubuntu hoary and a few others but none of these distributions (at least the way i installed them!)would recognise the rt2500 chipset on this pcmcia card, even with ndis wrapper.

Fedora Core 4 was released (been waiting keenly for it to arrive!) so i gave it a go.

The Armada 1700 was a lowly pentium 266 with 64mb of base ram, but fortunately this one had the extra memory card to bring it up to 160mb, and a 3.5gb hdd. just enough according to the fedora specs to run the gnome desktop with a little room to spare.

After a few problems reading the distribution cdroms, i applied the ide=nodma option and the disks were read successfully. next problem was that of the grub boot loader, having problems after completing the install with grub not loading the kernel. After some further research and a few mentions of problems with grub and the LVM Volume groups partitioning scheme, i reinstalled fc4 and manually partitioned the system with a ext2 boot, ext3 root and swap partitions. Fedora then installed (as a personal desktop) and grub worked normally.

Took me a while to get the kernel source installed but i followed the guides on the fedora release notes (along with a fair bit of reading up on various other sites on kernel source and compiling) and got it all installed ok following the "Fedora Core 4 Releaase Notes" document, section 6.2.2 Linux Kernel section guidelines up to and including 6.2.2.3. The only difference to the guidelines was that i had to specify kernel-2.6.spec when doing the rpmbuild step (instead of the specified kernel.spec). I am using the default i686 kernel and source.

Next step was to do some research on the rt2500 wireless lan drivers and see what i could find. I downloaded the latest drivers from the sourceforge rt2x00 project (late july) and prepared to compile them. I had to manually install a few rpms including the kernel-devel, kernel-headers, glibc headers, glibc kernheaders, glibc devel and gcc 4 not to mention rpm build (as the "personal desktop" install of fedora doesnt install the development software components - i'll re-do it later and install "workstation" instead).
I successfully compiled and installed the drivers according to the "RaLink 2400 Wireless LAN Card - Fedora Core 3 Installation" how to on the serial monkey website (http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/).

The first pass through the configuration the ra0 device was not found so i used the pcmcia command line tools to check if the card was recognised and it was recognised. I re-checked the config files in /etc/sysconfig as per the guidelines and discovered i missed configuring one of the files! (oops). also the fact that iwconfig reported "no wireless tools" tricked me and sent me on a goose chase and it was there all the time!

I configured the wireless settings on both the linksys access point and the rt2500 pcmcia card with no security (strictly a test network only, my fedora core 2 test web server and this fedora core 4 laptop) and set channel to 1 option in the rt2500 configuration file ifcfg-ra0 as the gnome network config tool didnt allow you to change the channel no from 1 (greyed out!).

I rebooted and pinged the web server ok and browsed my webserver contents no problems!

The moral of this story is, if you pick compatible hardware in advance (ie do your research before you buy - or in my case, borrow and try before you buy) and do your research on your distros website first, (not to mention the fact that o downloaded and read the ieee802.11 documents and bought and read an o'rielly "linux unwired" book) it will come together reasonable well.

coming from a long stint in the window$ world where there is plentiful well written do$umentation to fall back on, i have found it a little harder than most to easily find the right sources of information - i recall on one google search some commentary from some gurus who quoted zero to wireless in up to 10 hours - well, its taken me about three-four weeks elapsed time (i dont know when to give up) and about 25-30 hours including installing fc4 (ironing out problems) researching wireless cards and how tos, and about 3 hours to do the actual wireless install/config/startup!

[Note: after having hacked around with wireless for a few weeks since i initially wrote this article, it's actually quite easy to setup now! - could just about do it in my sleep. just needs lots of patience and perseverence and dont be afraid to ask for help from others...]

securing the network with WEP, WPA AES or WPA TKIP i found to be a bit finicky but with persistence, you'll get it to go! the setup above used DHCP to request an address from a dhcp server, whilst the wireless was configured as either no security or WEP security. Note: if you have some trouble with dhcp, get it working using a static address first, ensuring your gateway address is correct (ie the gateway address should be in the same network subnet). if i setup the computer using WEP security and then manually changed it and the linux wireless settings to WPA without rebooting, the WPA would come up successfully, but on reboot the machine would fail to obtain an ip address via dhcp.

so here's what i did.
1. I set the pc as having a static address initially (changed to dhcp later once i got wpa working).
2. i modified the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless script with the following lines APPENDED to the end of the file:

# comment about these extra lines
ifconfig mode managed
iwpriv ra0 set AuthMode=WPAPSK
iwpriv ra0 set EncrypType=TKIP
iwpriv ra0 set WPAPSK="mywpapskbb"
iwconfig ra0 essid "mywap54g2"
# comments of course matching the settings in my access point.

THEN i powered down the computer (if you dont, ra0 may not come up!) and back up again. Note: you can do the same for AES except using the EncrypType=AES option. WPAPSK using TKIP came up beautifully!

next steps include and optimising the kernel for the armada 1700 hardware (to wring out a little more performance!).

many thanks to the rt2x00 project on sourceforge, the fedora project for fedora core 2 and 4, and the hard work by all working on the wireless lan and wireless drivers (etc etc) (good work mark wallis and thanks for the help...).

all in all, a gratifying but humbling experience.

Andy.

PS as there are an awful lot of questions, howtos, general notes and faqs on the rt2500 series, and an apparently regular stream of new users of the rt2500 chipsets asking similar questions, would anyone be interested in helping to pull together a comprehensive howto for posting here and on the serial monkey website to help out other users. i'm thinking a modular howto, modular in the sense of breaking it down into a few main procedures, with sub modules for various distros and submodules for various makes (linksys, msi, etc etc) and types of interface (pci, usb, pcmcia/cardbus). i am interested in seeing one howto doco cover other makes and models of wireless cards as that would have helped me greatly when i started on wireless and linux together a few months ago! Send me a direct message if you're interested, or reply to this.

[DonPaulieone]

would you have a good walkthough on setting up the RT2500 on FC4. I am having so many problems. I wish i hadn't swaped out my Broadcom based card (only one i had that was Mac compatible) the RT chipset is a pain in the arse. Couldn't get it to work with ndiswrapper OR native drivers. bout ready to rewire my whole house with Cat-5. any help appreciated.

[andy@vicnet]

well, i'll do what i can. a little feedback from you will help so bear with me....

First major step.
-------------------
well, first step is to install fc4 as a workstation, to install the requisite rpms to allow recompiling of the kernel. in my aforementioned article, i initially installed fc4 as a "personal desktop" whcih of course did not include all of the rpms necessary to enable a compile of the driver, hence the suggestion to install as a workstation at least. second step, follow the fc4 release notes published on the fc4 website as described above. see the "Fedora Core 4 Releaase Notes" document, section 6.2.2 Linux Kernel section guidelines up to and including 6.2.2.3. The only difference to the guidelines was that i had to specify kernel-2.6.spec when doing the rpmbuild step (instead of the specified kernel.spec). I am using the default i686 kernel and source.

if you've installed ndiswrapper, sounds like you may have the kernel source and necessary software installed. is that the case ? were you able to successfully follow the notes as per the above ?

the three rt2500 cards i have installed and made work so far (up to wep security) are: the MSI cb54g2 pcmcia card (uses the rt2500 series chipset), the MSI PC54g2 pci card with external antenna on a 30cm cable, and the linksys pci wmp54g card.

i also established a working wireless network using a linksys wap54g, with no security enabled, using 2 windows xp pcs to test the cards (all three) and with the access point to determine i had conectivity. a good test to check you card and to verify that the settings you plan to use will work. what make/model of card do you have ? and do you have a seperate access point to test it against ?

moving on:

Are you running a pcmcia/cardbus card or a pci card ?

if you are running a pcmcia/cardbus card, check out the cardctl and related commands to check the card is recognised

are you running a pci card ?

if you are does the lspci command list the details of your pci card as expected ?

if youve got that far, the battle's just getting started.

i'd remove or disable ndiswrapper temporarily.

Next major step.
----------------------
i purchased a book entitled "linux unwired"(O'Reilly) and also sourced the 802.11 ieee documents for the 80211a,b,g and general documents. i spent about 1 week reading the ieee docs then the relevant sections of the orielly book to get enough background to make sense of the 80211 settings and parameters. armed with a working wiondows setup, and knowledge of 80211, i ploughed on.

Next major step. compiling the rt2500 driver.
----------------------------------------------------
I successfully compiled and installed the drivers according to the "RaLink 2400 Wireless LAN Card - Fedora Core 3 Installation" how to on the serial monkey website (http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/).

this was done using the rt2500 bs beta driver, so if you dont have it, then download it and compile it per the serial monkey notes above.

were you able to successfully follow those steps to compile the driver ?

are you getting error messages along the lines of "cant find rt2500" ?

i did have some problems after compiling the driver to get it load - the serial monkey instructions left out a step, which i only discovered after reading/researching as much about rt2500 on other peoples problems/howtos on the internet.

after expanding the archive, running make, then make install, i then had to run the command "depmod -a" (without the quotes of course!)

then reboot the machine.

read up on the wireless tools for linux stuff as fc4 already has them installed by default (as you prob already know) - what does iwconfig report to you ?

if you then follow the rest of the serial monkey article , it should fire up. as i said in my prior article, i initially setup using a no security network (i was using fresh built pcs not connected to anything else, in a standalone network) to enable a no fuss startup. then i added wep security to the wireless link successfully.

so i guess there are two questions - how far did you get through these steps, and have you got it going in the meantime ? was the missing depmod -a step crucial ?

lastly, i went through the install process of fc4 about 5-6 times before finally settling on a working install that would let me compile the kernel and the rt2500 successfully (i had problems with grub and logical volumes, then instaling the kernel source, then finding enough detail in one doco to get the rt2500 working - but the more i hacked at it it the more i learned and the easier it got. theres a few key issues - understand the wireless tools for linux and the iwconfig command line options (the orielly book although old is a great resource), understand the files (under /etc) used to setup the wireless network and the settings used in them - i had three cards to play with of the same chipset, time up my sleeve and plenty of perseverence. wireless is cheaper to setup than a physical lan cable infrastructure so its worth persevering. at the end of the day, if you cannot make it work the way you want, it may be cheaper to research and but a card known to work with all the wireless features than put in cable.

dont give up yet! - and reply with some feedback ..

[andy@vicnet]

In one iteration of the rt2500 setup with one of the pci cards, i also vaguely remember having to force the driver to load using the modprobe command, after compiling the module of course and doing the depmod -a command, after which it worked ok. eg "modprobe --force rt2500"

[DonPaulieone]

thanks for the walk through. While in windows i noticed that my Belkin Card has a RT 2560 chipset, not a 2500. When i go to modprobe the kernel module, the mouse and keyboard skip and freeze, then moments later, system lock (done this under Fedora and SuSE). so i don't think the 2560 works with the 2500 drivers, even though they are in the same numbered family of chipsets. i'm bout to rip out the wifi card outta the PowerMac because that was a Belkin F5D7000 Rev 1, and that worked FLAWLESSLY with ndiswrapper. thanks again for your help

[andy@vicnet]

Don,

imho if your belkin f5d7000 device works well under linux with ndiswrapper then stick with it!

i'm having good success using the compiled driver (not the ndis wrapper - although i didnt try too hard with ndiswrapper). if ndiswrapper had worked well for me i would have stuck with it too.

the main thing is that rt2500 based cards {the ones i and others have tested} work when not using ndiswrapper so it can be made to work reliably. most likely an ndis nic driver (version or card specific ?) issue.

Note: for interest sake, the rt2500 chipset is collectively comprised of the 2560 [the baseband/mac driver chip] and the 2525 [the rf driver] ) so your rt2560 chip on the board is the visible part; the rt2525 chip will likely be under the shield.

at some soon i'll try the ndiswrapper myself with the rt2500 ...

[djino]

My machine has a dual boot system with Win XP and Fedora. So my wireless configurations are working fine in win xp.

Now, I believe I configured the wireless configurations in fedora correctly. As I can access my wireless router at 192.168.1.1 with Firefox. But if I try going to any websites for example (www.google.ca) OR if I even try accessing my VOIP gateway (that my wireless router is behind) at 192.168.15.1 I get a pop up message saying Connection to ...... refused.

Does anyone know what I might be doing wrong?

Thanks

Kerwin

[andy@vicnet]

possibly your linux firewall (if installed/enabled) may be blocking traffic, or if you have firewalling on your wireless router it may need configuration ..