Redhat Linux 8.0

The following instructions assume that you are using Red Hat 8.0 with a Lucent/Avaya/Agere WaveLAN/Orinoco card that is already plugged in to the PCMCIA card slot of your laptop, or the PCMCIA adapter of your desktop. If you have some other brand of wireless card, the following instructions are similar (or possibly identical) to the procedures for that card. Questions can be sent to Andrew Widdowson (apw2 at andrew.)

Redhat 8 provides a much easier interface for manipulating network connections. From the "red hat" button located on your panel in either KDE or Gnome, find "Network" in the "System Settings" menu. Alternatively, run the "redhat-config-network" command.

This will bring up a "Network Configuration" window that has four tabs. Select the "Hardware" tab, and you will see a list of the recognized network devices. In the screenshot below we see that the user has a RealTek network adapter for wired ethernet (yours will most likely be different) and they have a Lucent wireless card. Note: if you have an Avaya or Agere wireless card, it will still be labeled as Lucent on this screen. That is okay. The important part is that there must be a wireless adapter listed here in order to proceed. If there isn't, you're out of luck. This means that Redhat does not recognize that your card exists.

Note the "Device" name that Redhat assigns to your card (it's usually eth1). Switch back to the "Devices" tab and click the "Add..." button. Select your wireless card, and click "Forward"

Set the mode to "Managed" and specify the SSID as "CMU". Then click "Forward."

Your settings should appear as below. Click "Forward."

Make sure that your settings match those below (although you might not be eth1 as mentioned earlier). If you do, you're almost there. Click "Apply".

Now that Redhat has your wireless card set as a device, you can activate it and deactivate it at will. But you might want to set it up to start at boot time. To do that, select your wireless device and click "Edit...".

You can toggle device activation at boot from this screen.

When you're done setting it up, you'll want to test it. Click "Activate" on the previous screen, and you'll see this dialog appear:

Everything should be working now. Additionally, if you want to activate or deactivate your wireless connection manually, you can run the "Network Device Control" located in the "System Tools" section of your red hat menu.