With 5.9 Std Final, I found with two different computers that even when the wireless device is supported out of the box, I still had to start Wifi-Radar, select Preferences, and check the box that says Ifup Required (and also check auto-detect if it was not already checked). Alternatively, the command-line savy person can use commands to start the interface. Once that is done, if your hardware is already supported, you should see wireless networks (yours at a minimum) in Wifi-Radar. From there you can set up any required encryption, etc. to get connected.
Not knowing the Ifup checkbox trick in Wifi-Radar, when wireless didn't work after the first boot following installation, I ended up going thru several steps in the HowTo that I really didn't need to do. 5.9 appears to support quite a lot of drivers out of the box, so this is a heads-up that your interface may be supported right out of the gate, and it's only a few check boxes away to verify that it works.
After re-booting, everything entered via Wifi-Radar is saved (WEP key, etc.), but you still have to start Wifi-radar and click "connect" to re-connect to your wireless network. Here are some ways to get around that.
a) if you are using WEP, edit /etc/rc.d/rc.local and add the following at the end:
iwconfig eth0 essid yourssid key yourWEPkey
dhcpcd eth0
(substitute eth1, eth2, or whatever applies to your connection for eth0 above)
I did the above on the desktop since it will always connect to my home wireless network.
On the laptop, I got a little fancier - a shell script with the following lines:
#!/bin/bash
sudo /sbin/iwconfig ath0 essid myssid key myWEPkey
sudo /sbin/dhcpdc ath0
(substitute ath0 with eth0, eth1, etc. as applicable and use your ssid and WEP key as needed)
Then I created a desktop file that executes the script. The key line in the desktop file is as follows:
Exec=/home/username/location/shell-script.sh
In order to first test the script, I executed it with
./shell-script.sh at the command line. I'm a relative newbie to Linux, and I don't quite understand why the dot-slash is needed to execute it at the command line but not in the launcher. Now when the laptop first boots, I have a desktop icon that I just double-click in order to connect to the network. The idea is to create more scripts for other networks I connect to, so that I can choose depending on where I am when I fire up the laptop. Besides, it's cool to double-click the icon and see the light on the network card come on immediately.
Here are some other 5.9 observations relative to the HowTo on wireless setup. Both my desktop and laptop are using wireless devices that worked right out of the box (after enabling them in WiFi-Radar via the Ifup checkbox)
1) Editing /etc/modprobe.conf to add alias statements/commands appeared to have no effect.
Both laptop and desktop work fine with only the original alias statement for the unused
wired ethernet port.
2) I am relatively certain that editing /etc/ifplugd/ifplugd.conf had no effect, either. My memory is
fuzzier on this, but I believe that everything worked fine with the original
INTERFACES="eth0" statement even when the wireless card in the desktop initially came up as eth1 and was detected
as such by Wifi-Radar.
3) There was no existing /etc/udev/rules.d/network-devices.rules file in 5.9, but it was easy to create.
The eth0/eth1 swapping issue that I read that people had issues with in 5.8 happened to me in 5.9
on the desktop. I locked the wireless interface to eth0 using this file. (the laptop came up using
ath0 for wireless evidently due to the atheros? chip on the D-Link PCMCIA card) I put the statement
in network-devices.rules for associating ath0 with the MAC address of the card, but everything was
fine without it.
