WiFi Linux on a shoestring

CAUTION: this is a geeky Linuxy post that’s really just here because I’ll forget how I did this in about a week and I might want to do this again some time…

Ages ago I put Xubuntu – a cut-down version of Linux – on an ancient Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptop. The other day I found an old Cisco Aironet 350 wireless PCMCIA card lying around and it occurred to me that if I could get it working then this old laptop could be a bit more useful – if only for web-browsing in the tree house without worrying about the kids damaging my PowerBook.

The XFCE graphical environment I installed has very few bells and whistles – there’s certainly no GUI to tweak WiFi settings, so I plugged the Cisco card in the top PCMCIA slot and went to the command line and tried iwconfig to see what was wirelessly going on inside, if anything; it looked a bit like this, suggesting some WiFi action was possible on the eth1 interface:

interface:myname@tecra8000:~$ iwconfig

lo no wireless extensions.

irda0 no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:” ”
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.417 GHz Access Point: 00:00:00:76:FC:04
Bit Rate:11 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Sensitivity=0/65535
Retry limit:16 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=90/100 Signal level=-50 dBm Noise level=-98 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:14 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:4253 Missed beacon:0

So then I edited the interfaces file like this:

sudo pico /etc/network/interfaces

to make the primary network interfaces section read like this, including the name of my wireless router and its WEP key:

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
wireless-key abcdef123456
wireless-essid MyRouterSSID

And then I restarted networking like this:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Then to get the machine to start the graphical environment as soon as I log in at the command line, I added these lines to /home/myname/.bash_profile:

if [ "$(tty)" = "/dev/tty1" -o "$(tty)" = "/dev/vc/1" ] ; then
startx
fi

Brilliant!