How to add a wireless lan to Zeta

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How to add a wireless lan card to Zeta

First of all, insert your wireless card into either PCcard (PCMCIA) slot. Start the Terminal, and type cardctl ident and hit ENTER. You will now get some information about the card that you have in the PCcard slot. Leave this Terminal window open, as you will be adding parts of the output to a settings file.

For this example, we have been using Patrick Lafarguette's hfa384x driver. The driver manages IEEE 802.11b wireless network adapters based on the Intersil Prism 2/2.5/3 (HFA3841 and HFA3842 MAC processors).

Open the file /boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/pcmcia.default in StyledEdit (or your prefered text editor). Go all the way to the bottom of the settings file. Copy the format of the last entry.

Compare the image on the right with the picture of my terminal window above to see what I added. The key here is the line labeled "bind". There are a few things you can put in here: "wavelan", "prism" or "hfa384x_cs", the three types of chipsets currently supported in Zeta. Try "wavelan" first. If the card doesn't work with that binding, change it to eighter "prism" or "hfa384x_cs". This specific line tells Zeta what driver to load when the card is inserted.

Finish with saving the file.

When using the hfa384x driver, you also have to add some information about the accesspoint:

An accesspoint can run in two modes, IBSS/eer to peer network (0) or BSS/ infrastructure network with an access point (1). The default value in mode is 1.

You will also have to specify the radio channel that the accesspoint operates on. Possible values are from 1 to 14.

Specify the name of the network (ssid) to join or create. Up to 32 characters. If this value is not specified in BSS mode, the adapter can join all the existing networks.

Specify if the frames are encrypted (privacy):

- 0 - disable privacy
- 1 - enable WEP 64 bits
- 2 - enable WEP 128 bits

The default value in the settings file is 0.

Define the four keys associated with WEP. A key is a succession of 5 or 13 ASCII characters according to the selected level of privacy (1 or 2).

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