Wifi hint for those running recent kernels on Salix 13.37

[GJones]

I just compiled and installed a very recent 3.7.1 custom kernel on Salix 13.37. To my annoyance, I discovered on reboot that my Broadcom card was listed by iwlist as a wired ethernet card. The correct module and firmware were being loaded, but Wicd didn't see the device.

However, it turns out that the iw command does correctly see the card as wireless. Maybe the API for userspace programs changed? Anyway, the commands indicated here all work fine.

So for now, my workaround is to disable Wicd and fall back on using the wireless tools and wpa_supplicant, only this time with iw instead of iwconfig and iwlist.

P.S. If you need a temporary connection to a wifi network, and don't want to create a config file for wpa_supplicant, you can pipe in the information from wpa_passphrase:

Code: Select all

# wpa_passphrase myssid mypassphrase | wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -Dwext -c/dev/stdin -B

This looks a little ugly, but it should (at least theoretically) work. Yay UNIX CLI tools.