Wifi & Networking Configuration

Setting up Wifi under Gentoo involves several steps.

Get your driver working

• This depends on your wireless card. Usually it will require very recent releases of the Linux kernel, and additional drivers or programs.

• Once you have an interface working (eg iwconfig lists something) you can proceed to the next step.

Associating with an access point and Authentication

• Emerge wpa_supplicant.

• The configuration file used by wpa_supplicant under Gentoo is in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf. So edit your changes there. Sample below:

network={
        ssid="Arda"
        scan_ssid=1
        proto=WPA
        pairwise=CCMP TKIP
        psk="password_goes_here_56831"
        priority=2
}

• The pairwise option specifies the cryptographic algorithms used for authentication. CCMP also means AES.

• To basically test if authentication is working, launch wpa_supplicant with the -c and -i flags, supplying both a configuration file and an interface name. Example:

wpa_supplicant -ieth1 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Note that if you forget the -i or -c flag, wpa_supplicant will refuse to work.

• Once it is working, create a symlink in /etc/init.d:

ln -s net.lo net.eth1

where you replace eth1 with your interface name.

• Add some configuration options to /etc/conf.d/net. See for example this Gentoo documentation.

• Finally run /etc/init.d/net.eth1 start and if everything goes smoothly, you can add it to the default run level.

ipw3945 specific notes

• Be careful to add the daemon init script to the boot runlevel, not the default one. Else things won't work automatically after boot.

• Do not include ipw3945 in the list of modules to be autoloaded, let the daemon load this module automatically.

A note on init scripts on Gentoo

In fact there is only a single init script, net.lo, for the loop back interface. Other scripts are simply added by making symbolic links to net.lo, changing the "lo" with the new interface name.