Getting wireless network working on CentOS 5 and Thinkpad T42

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 ~]$ chkconfig –level 345 NetworkManager on
[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.

[root@localhost ~]$ yum install ipw2200-firmware

This page is mostly a note for myself but if it helps someone else out then all the better.

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Comments

    bilety lotnicze posted the comment on January 4th, 2009

  1. Very interesting article. Thanks

    2. jesse posted the comment on October 20th, 2009

  2. Keep up the good work, and post more articles like the one you have posted above.

    3. keithb posted the comment on October 11th, 2010

  3. Thanks for this article, which I found by googling…

    My particular T42-2373 wanted ipw2100-firmware instead of the 2200 version. I also had to invoke chkconfig and service commands via their path in sbin for some reason, like this, with the double dash in front of the level switch

    /sbin/chkconfig –level 345 NetworkManager on

    To make the symlinks, these commands were issued from root (su first).

    Now it all works! CentOS boots in around 134Mb…

    4. Alvaro Chavez Zubieta posted the comment on December 26th, 2010

  4. me sirvio de mucho aparentemente tan facil.. gracias

    5. Jamal posted the comment on June 19th, 2011

  5. Thanks