I've taken on setting up Gentoo over winter break and I've hit a roadblock with the wireles configuration. The device setup recognized my wireless card, and it lists devices as 'lo' and 'eth0' One of them should be the integrated ethernet adapter, and the other should be the wireless card. When I net-setup either of them they both refuse to set up anything but a loopback connection. I've gotten wireless service at this location before with an ubuntu live CD, but the ubuntu install failed to detect the wireless network. And ideas?
lo is the loopback device, (127.0.0.1) so ignore that completely, as it's not a real hardware device. eth0 is a hardware ethernet port, that should work fine. if it's not listing then it either can't find it (lack of drivers) or something else is wrong.
What do I have in terms of options to help Gentoo recognize the device? Under the initial hardware scan it saw the adapter and I thought it went by without a hitch, Is there a way I can prompt a netowrk device scan?
Try "iwlist scan"? Don't worry if your network isn't picked up automatically, on the 4 machines I have installed linux on, the wireless has always worked eventually, but never automatically picked up the network, I needed to use iwconfig. Nevertheless "iwlist scan" may well work. Gentoo can also be installed just as well from knoppix (for stage3 installs - most users.) When I tried gentoo, to get my rt2500 working I had to: Partition the disks and copy the stage3 tarball and portage snapshot from ubuntu or knoppix (and install GRUB). Edit make.conf, and edit if necessary /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab. From another pc/operating system with internet, download any "packages?" I needed rt2500, wireless-tools, and vanilla-kernel. Get these from a gentoo mirror in the folder called distfiles. Place these in /usr/local/portage/distfiles/ (I had to create the distfiles folder, but I may be wrong about the location of the portage folder, possibly just /usr?) Then you just need to boot the minimal install cd, mount the partitions, emerge -av wireless-tools rt2500 etc, compile kernel... BOOT This took me ages to figure out, so I thought I'd share what I needed to do. Some of it may be a little muddled though
please spécifide your wireless card, and your need to create an init for it if it is an atheros/madwifi card, load the wlan kernel modules (if not built in), encryption and other modules
The standard portage dir is /usr/portage/distfiles. There you have to put the sources. Like allready said, lo is the loopback interface (localhost) and eth0 is the first physical one, probably the wired one. Do (as root) a "lspci", that lists all pci devices. On my lappy that gives me Code: 02:02.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T (rev 01) 02:04.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection (rev 05) Eth0 and eth1 respectively. Just google your chipset/brand and you'll get a guide quickly enough.
I am not familiar with Gentoo so I can't give any advice about the location of configuration files, but here's a suggestion for troublshooting wireless problems: 1. Switch to root user: 2. As Glider as already pointed out, check to see that your wireless card (wireless interface card, wireless adapter, whatever you want to call it) is recognised by the kernel: Code: lspci You should see it listed. 3. You then need to check if there is a kernel module (aka 'driver') for your card or if you need to use ndiswrapper. Check the Gentoo web site (and google it if necessary) to find the answer to this. 4. Having identified your kernel module, check to see that it has been loaded into the kernel: Code: lsmod | grep 'putthenameofyourmodulehere' 4. If it's not been loaded then load it into the kernel with the modprobe command, ie.: And then run lsmod again to see that it's loaded. 5. Next, check that you have wireless-tools installed and run 'iwlist' (as Confused Fishcake said). If you get a bash error about not recognising iwlist then you need to go and install wireless-tools. iwlist will list all know wireless interfaces. 6. Next you need to configure your wireless interface using the iwconfig command. Assuming it's called 'eth1' try: Just substitute the name of your wireless interface for 'eth1' if it's not called eth1. There are other options you can pass to iwconfig eg. mode, channel, key - but they're not always necessary. Read the man page for iwconfig. Note, although it doesn't say in the man page, the 'key' parameter for iwconfig is for a WEP key only, ie. you cannot use it for WPA. Again, you don't need to set the key parameter if you're not running any sort of key encryption. 7. Having configured your wireless adapter card (or whatever you call it) you then need to activate it with the ifconfig command: 8. You now need to restart your network. I'm afraid I don't know how to do this in Gentoo. You'll need to ask on the Gentoo forums for that, unless someone here can provide you with the answer. Once done, you should be able to connect with wireless. 9. Finally, don't forget to logout of root with 'exit' Someone please correct me if I've got anything wrong here.
This is true, but it's a good (IMHO better) practice to type Code: su - This als cd's to the user's dir (in this case, /root/). That makes it less confusing, certainly in the beginning EDIT: I have a remark on the modprobe... That should work if you compiled the driver as a module, but in Gentoo you can choose between module, in kernel or nowhere. so that might be worth checking too (unless you used genkernel)
