wpa wireless on a IBM Thinkpad T43p (running Debian Etch)
by Anton Piatek
So after writing about setting up the wireless on my desktop, I now have got it working on my laptop. All it needed was the wpasupplicant package and the ipw2200 network driver (and of course the ieee80211 network stack), though I installed all those ages ago, so cannot remember what was involved, but I think they are in a standard kernel.
It wasn’t all that hard to get encryption working, though it does appear that my patch to wpa_supplicant does change the way it was intended to work. I am not sure if it is a general wpa_supplicant change, or a Debian specific change, but to launch wpa_supplicant I am supposed to use the “wext” driver, instead of the ipw one which relates to my network card.
This was in the Debian readme for wpa_supplicant, but I did spend a while trying to use the ipw driver in wpa_supplicant before finding it. For completeness, I have 2 of my config files below (the only ones needed in fact)
/etc/network/interfaces
iface eth1 inet dhcp<br /> wireless-essid ant-wifi<br /> wpa-driver wext<br /> wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf<br />
/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
`
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant</p>
eapol_version=1
ap_scan=1
fast_reauth=1
network={
ssid="ant-wifi"
proto=WPA
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP WEP104 WEP40
psk="****"
priority=2
}
`
The next stage will be trying to get the WPA-EAP/LEAP working at work. That WILL be more challenging