CentOS 5, VAIO and Wireless

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I own a Sony VAIO laptop on which I dual boot either Windows XP or CentOS 5 (Linux Kernel). I always wanted to get wireless networking to work but, the plain and simple truth is that although the core components for wireless activities are present, there are vital applications missing which allow a user to connect wirelessly in a similar manner to Windows. So the hunt began. Now I'm not one to beat around the bush so here's what I found (that worked for me). My model of laptop uses the Intel 3945ABG wireless adapter and although CentOS appears to identify it, I always got the message whenever I tried to activate the device: Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (8B2A): SET failed on device wlan0; Invalid argument. SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such file or directory Failed to bring up wlan0. After sifting through huge amounts of postings to forums about all the tweaks and options other people had tried and failed with, I found this article, that pointed out that CentOS 5 (and for that matter RHEL 5) simply doesn't have all the required tools to make it work. Here's an outline of what you need to do: 1) Add Dag Wieers repo from HERE. Chose your flavour from the list. Download the file to the root directory and extract all files. 2) yum install dkms-ipw3945 3) chkconfig --level 345 NetworkManager on chkconfig --level 345 NetworkManagerDispatcher on 4) Reboot You will now have an icon in your system tray from which you can simply configure your wireless connections.
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In: linux, networkAuthor: Editor