Getting wireless network working on CentOS 5 and Thinkpad T42
by Mats Hellman on 15.Dec, 2008 under Linux
I pulled an old IBM Thinkpad T42 to use as a “light” and “mobile” laptop on the daily train ride to Helsinki. It’s not new but more than usable with 768Mb RAM and CentOS 5 installed. This gives me a full development environment to work with on the train. What I noticed was the problem to get the wireless network up on this thing.
I tried editing /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf, I ran iwconfig. I scanned etc. And it just didn’t want to work.
The hardware seemed to be working, but not the network settings. Why?
Google to the rescue
As always when you are troubleshooting the place to start is google.com.After reading a lot of pages, some better some worse I found NetworkManager. How could I have missed this? Later I even found a document at centos.org describing how to use this.
Using NetworkManager
Finding I should use NetworkManager I started up the service and stopped the network service. I got a list of the Wireless networks and 10 seconds later I was surfing with the wireless network.
To set NetworkManager to start automatically you should do the following
[root@localhost ~]$ service NetworkManager start
[root@localhost ~]$ chkconfig –level 2345 network off
[root@localhost ~]$ service network stop
You should now have a nice network icon in your Gnome system tray and clicking it should show the wireless networks available.
Installs
To be clear this is what I installed.
The , to get a lot of packages. And after setting up rpmforge I just pulled firmware for the network card.
This page is mostly a note for myself but if it helps someone else out then all the better.
Installing Microsoft Corefonts on CentOS 5
by Mats Hellman on 12.Dec, 2008 under Linux
This is a thing I always have to google when I need to install Microsoft’s fonts in my CentOS installs so I thought I’d post a short dirty note here to remind me how to do it.
First of all we need some tools to build ourselves the RPM for msttcorefonts, so fire up your terminal and
When finished run the following as root
[root@localhost build]$ rpmbuild -ba msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
[root@localhost build]$ rpm -ivh /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm
[root@localhost build]$ /sbin/service xfs reload
That’s it. You should now have Microsoft’s standard fonts installed and ready to go.
