Fedora 10 in Asus Mini Nova Lite PX24 (2): Wireless Networking

My friend Tomasz gave me yesterday the configuration to enable Wireless Networking at system-level (skipping NetworkManager) for Ubuntu. It’s just modifying /etc/network/interfaces to setup the Wireless device directly there:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
 
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless-key s:your_f****_password_here
wireless-essid your_f****_essid_here


I wanted the same in my home Fedora 10 server, but as you already may know, Fedora 10 is based on Red Hat, so forget about the debian-like network configuration, and welcome to the system-config-* scripts!

You can edit your system-level network configuration, executing, as root:

$> system-config-network

(or clicking on System->Administration->Network)

In the Wireless Settings tab you should select “Managed” mode, and I also specified the correct SSID of my home wireless network. Be really careful if adding the WEP key in HEX, as you must prepend “0x” to the whole key or it won’t work.

I thought that this would be enough, but nope. NetworkManager is launched by default at system startup, not the /etc/init.d/network script, which is disabled by default. You just need to disable NetworkManager, and enable the standard “network” script in order to have the system-level wireless configuration, executing, as root:

$> service NetworkManager stop
$> chkconfig --level 35 NetworkManager off
$> service network start
$> chkconfig --level 35 network on


I really like chkconfig, but not sure if the “service” command is a needed replacement of executing the script from /etc/init.d directly.

Fedora 10 in Asus Mini Nova Lite PX24 (1)

I recently bought a small Asus Mini Nova Lite PX24 and of course, installed GNU/Linux on it. I chose Fedora 10 because at that time, it was the only distro I tested with the required driver for the Wireless interface:
Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter

Other distros I have tried in the Asus PX24 are:
* Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron [Doesn't work]
* OpenSUSE-11.1-GNOME [Doesn't work]
* Debian 5.0 Lenny [Doesn't work]
* Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope Alpha-5 [Works]

I was a Kubuntu fan until release 8.10, which completely destroyed the usability and stability of the distribution when shipping a non-stable version of KDE4. Switched then back to Gnome in Ubuntu 8.10, far more stable than the KDE counterpart. So now that I know that next stable version of Ubuntu also makes the Wireless networking work out-of-the-box, I thought of changing the PX24 back to Ubuntu.

But I won’t… I want to try yum, RH’s system-config-whatever scripts, SELinux… all those things that are not available in Ubuntu.