blog

26 November 2006

Getting a WMP56G pci wifi card working under debian etch

by Anton Piatek

So I got my card working not long ago, then went and bought a amd64 pc and had to do it all again. It wasn’t a walk in the park last time, and this time the driver would compile but wouldn’t load. I was about to email the amd64 debian mailing list when I found someone saying to try the rt2x00 driver. So I did…

module-assistant get rt2x00
module-assistant build rt2x00
module-assistant install rt2x00
modrpobe rt2x00

All fine, so I decided to try loading up the card.
my /etc/network/interfaces looks like:

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless-essid MySSID
wpa-driver wext
wpa-conf /etc/wpasupplicant.conf

and my /etc/wpasupplicant.conf was modified from the wpa example supplied with the wpasupplicant package (/usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant) and looks like

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
ssid=”my ssid”
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=WPA
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
psk=”my wifi key”
}

Then running

ifup wlan0

and I am connected.

Sooo much simpler than the other way I did it

EDIT: Don’t forget (like I did first) to grab the firmware from ralink as the driver won’t work without the firmware files!

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