Wifi on CentOS

Hello all,

I will be upgrading an old Fedora box of mine to CentOS, mostly so
that I can run some corporate-type software that requires RHEL. I'd
also like to add the box to my home wireless setup which uses a
Linksys WRT54GS and cable modem.

I am basically wondering if anyone can recommend any USB wifi adapters
which are easily used under CentOS - I have trawled the forums but
can't get a picture as to whether this is going to be a pain requiring
extra kernel modules etc or whether some should run out of the box -
I'd be grateful for any experiences. Ideally cheap USB stuff available
in the UK...

And while I'm on, I am going to CentOS because, last thing I heard,
this was the cheapest way to run a copy of RHEL - is this still the
case or should I be considering other distros?

Many thanks,
ed

(E-Mail Removed) wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I will be upgrading an old Fedora box of mine to CentOS, mostly so
> that I can run some corporate-type software that requires RHEL. I'd
> also like to add the box to my home wireless setup which uses a
> Linksys WRT54GS and cable modem.
>
> I am basically wondering if anyone can recommend any USB wifi adapters
> which are easily used under CentOS - I have trawled the forums but
> can't get a picture as to whether this is going to be a pain requiring
> extra kernel modules etc or whether some should run out of the box -
> I'd be grateful for any experiences. Ideally cheap USB stuff available
> in the UK...
>
> And while I'm on, I am going to CentOS because, last thing I heard,
> this was the cheapest way to run a copy of RHEL - is this still the
> case or should I be considering other distros?
>
> Many thanks,
> ed
>

The wireless question has been answered here numerous times but, someone
will probably make a recommendation. I can't help you there except to
say that recommendation will probably include "avoid the USB route like
the plague".

As far as CentOS, yes, by all means. If you do not require support, it
is an excellent alternative. I am using it here in a production
environment on three machines. One is a mail server for about 70 users,
one a file server and DNS/DHCP server and the third one is a K6-3 200
with 128M RAM and a SCSI drive as a file server at a remote location.
That last machine has been chugging along just nicely for years! It had
even had an uptime of over 500 days till an extended power outage caused
a shutdown.

Rich Piotrowski
--
"Now are you talking about what it is you know
or just repeating what it was you heard."
Grace Slick
To E-mail use: rpiotro(at)wi(dot)rr(dot)com

On 14 Mar, 16:57, Rich Piotrowski <a...@wi.rr.com> wrote:
> edhead2...@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
> > Hello all,
>
> > I will be upgrading an old Fedora box of mine to CentOS, mostly so
> > that I can run some corporate-type software that requires RHEL. I'd
> > also like to add the box to my home wireless setup which uses a
> > Linksys WRT54GS and cable modem.
>
> > I am basically wondering if anyone can recommend any USB wifi adapters
> > which are easily used under CentOS - I have trawled the forums but
> > can't get a picture as to whether this is going to be a pain requiring
> > extra kernel modules etc or whether some should run out of the box -
> > I'd be grateful for any experiences. Ideally cheap USB stuff available
> > in the UK...
>
> > And while I'm on, I am going to CentOS because, last thing I heard,
> > this was the cheapest way to run a copy of RHEL - is this still the
> > case or should I be considering other distros?
>
> > Many thanks,
> > ed
>
> The wireless question has been answered here numerous times but, someone
> will probably make a recommendation. I can't help you there except to
> say that recommendation will probably include "avoid the USB route like
> the plague".

Thanks for the response. For the record, I now have a Belkin USB
device successfully connecting to my Linksys router using WPA-AES. I
had to build a driver from rt2x00.serialmonkey.com but it wasn't
difficult and there is a good, knowledgeable community there. This is
using CentOS 4.4/2.6.9 - I think if I had gone with 5, I would have
had further driver options given the more recent kernel.

Although I can connect stably and successfully with the WRT54GS, I am
having trouble getting things just as I need them with a static IP and
so on - but that needs a new thread...

Cheers,
cam