The pcmcia-cs package has a wireless startup script which sets various parameters for wireless ethernet adaptors. The script /etc/pcmcia/wireless is not called upon initialization of pcmcia wireless ethernet adaptors. The problem is that the script /etc/pcmcia/network was modified to use the redhat standard ifup mechanism without attention to wireless cards. This bug prevents use of wireless ethernet adaptors in redhat linux. This bug affects previous redhat distributions as well (6.2 confirmed). Included is a diff the /etc/pcmica/network to make wireless support work. Also, you don't have a separate component listed for kernel-pcmcia-cs in the bug tracking system --- /etc/pcmcia/network Tue Aug 22 12:58:14 2000 +++ network.pcmcia-wireless Wed Dec 6 21:34:46 2000 @@ -11,6 +11,21 @@ action=$1 device=$2 +ACTION=$action + +if [ -r ./shared ] ; then . ./shared ; else . /etc/pcmcia/shared ; fi + +get_info $device +HWADDR=`/sbin/ifconfig $device | sed -n -e 's/.*addr \([^ ]*\) */\1/p'` + +ADDRESS="$SCHEME,$SOCKET,$INSTANCE,$HWADDR" + +if [ -x ./wireless ] ; then + . ./wireless +else + . /etc/pcmcia/wireless +fi + case "${action:?}" in 'start') /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup ifcfg-${device}
NOTE: This bug is in RedHat 7.2 also, I ran into this one and here's how I solved it: 1- Install the rpm's You'll need two rpms to get started : wireless-tools and kernel-pcmcia-cs. Either download them from rpmfind.net or get them from the RH7.2 install cd. To install just, rpm -ivh <package_name>. 2- Fix /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia The /etc/init.d/pcmcia rc script tries to source in /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia. The default pcmcia file on RH7.2 has some pretty funky options. I just backed mine up and changed the options to the following: PCMCIA=yes PCIC=i82365 PCIC_OPTS= CORE_OPTS= CARDMGR_OPTS= SCHEME=essidany Note: The default pcmcia file had pcmcia turned off, no PCIC setting, and did not include a line for SCHEME. 3- Fix /etc/pcmcia/network When the /etc/init.d/pcmcia script runs, you'll see in syslog it does a ./network start eth0 . That's not /etc/init.d/network start , but instead /etc/pcmcia/network start . The problem is by default /etc/pcmcia/network start does actually nothing. There's a comment there that reads, "We don't do *anything* here. We get a hotplug event when the ethX device is registered, and we bring the device up there". That has never worked for me, thus I changed it. To get around this bug in the script I have the /etc/pcmcia/network start actually start the network as one would expect it should. So I changed the "start" section to read: 'start') [ -f /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-${device} ] && \ /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup ifcfg-${device} ;; 4- Configure the interface eth0 Since the /etc/pcmcia/network start $device script is going to try to up the device (default eth0) we need to make sure we have that interface configured for dhcp. You can configure eth0 however you want: netconf, netconfig, linuxconf, or good old vi. I prefer to just manually vi the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. Here's what mine looks like: DEVICE="eth0" ONBOOT="yes" BOOTPROTO="dhcp" 5- Restart the pcmcia script From here the configuration should be set for the wireless card to load the wvlan_cs driver (default setting), and use the "essidany" scheme. To test it /etc/init.d/pcmcia restart .