Y'know, I love Vector Linux. It's my favorite distro. But I can see where someone might get put off if they had to spend an entire day setting the wireless connection. Of course, after I've gone through the steps several times it doesn't take that long. For me, it's been a good excercise in learning how to find where the settings for wireless setup are kept in the file system and in using VASM. I also think I am using a pre-release version of 5.8 SOHO (RC3?) so maybe it will get better in the final version, or in version 6.0.
I followed the directions on this forum to set up the wireless network. But try as I might the VASM simply would not set up the wireless. I finally got it working (and I am online here with this wireless connection) but I still don't understand why VASM does not set the interfaces to a fixed number. I set the "alias" lines in /etc/modprobe.conf to the following:
alias etho via-rhine
alias eth1 ndiswrapper
I spent a lot of time trying to set up an alias for "wlan0" but I could never get it to take. Every time I rebooted the only two interfaces that would work were eth0 and eth1. I settled for using eth1 for the wireless card.
I set up the wireless interface in VASM to eth1 and I successfully connected to my ESSID. At that point I had both my wired ethernet and my wireless network each with a valid IP address. When I used ifconfig to look at the set up it listed the network ports as:
eth0 Wired Ethernet (the MAC address was for my wired port)
eth1 Wireless (MAC address was for my Broadcom wireless)
Next, I rebooted and removed the wire from the wired port. I wanted to test only the wireless connection. When the boot was finished I used ifconfig again to take a look. Now the ports looked like this:
eth0 Wireless port
eth1 Wired port
What? Why did it it switch it back? This happened earlier in the day and slowed me down. I finally figured out that I could go into VASM and edit the interface setting and get the wireless connection to work.
How am I going to set this wireless port to a static device number so that I don't have to reset the interface every time? Also, how can I use wlan0 instead of eth1 or eth0? I'm confused as to why Vector did not set up the wireless under wlan0 instead of using the ethernet device.
Anyway, I'm happy I finally got wireless working in Vector 5.8. I never did figure it out in 5.1. So, now I can take this thing out to the porch and play with Linux instead of being teathered to the wire.
Can someone help me figure out this problem of the interface switching?
Thank you,
Sean