88 CHAPTER 8 GETTING EVERYTHING UP AND (Web design seattle)
88 CHAPTER 8 GETTING EVERYTHING UP AND RUNNING Perhaps it goes without saying that you should ensure your wireless card is compatible with WPA before you start. It s found on models of one or, at most, two years old. You can learn this information from the card s packaging or by visiting the manufacturer s web site. Caution Some earlier wireless cards rushed to include WPA before it was fully certified and may feature buggy implementations. In such cases, it might be possible to update the firmware of the card, usually using a utility that runs in Windows. If you suspect your card has this fault, check the manufacturer s support site for details. You ll also need to know if the card uses a driver module that s compatible with wpasupplicant, the software that handles WPA management under Ubuntu. As this book went to press, wpasupplicant was compatible with the following wireless drivers: HostAP, Prism54, Madwifi, Atmel, wext, NdisWrapper, and ipw. You can discover which driver your card uses through Ubuntu s Device Manager. Open Device Manager (System . Administration . Device Manager) and look for your wireless card in the list of hardware on the left side of the window. Once you find it, select it, and then click the Advanced tab on the right side of the window. Find the line that reads info.linux.driver, and look in the Value column for the name of the driver. If what you discover isn t in the list of compatible drivers, then wpasupplicant won t work with your card. If it is present, make a note of the name of the driver, because you ll need to know it to complete the configuration. Finally, you ll need to know how Ubuntu refers to your wireless card. Open the Network Settings applet (System . Administration . Networking) and look for the entry in the list referring to your wireless card. It should read, The interface for x is active/not configured, where x will be eth0, ath0, or wlan0 (or possibly something else). Whatever the case, make a note of it for later use. Note There s a chance that wpasupplicantwill support more drivers than those I ve listed by the time you read this. With the version I used, I could find out which drivers were supported by viewing the help documentation that appeared when I typed wpasupplicant, without any command options, in a GNOME Terminal window. To install the wpasupplicant software, first configure the Synaptic Package Manager to access Ubuntu s online software repositories. This is necessary to download the wpasupplicant software package. If you haven t already set up online repositories, see the Setting Up Online Software Repositories section later in this chapter. Once that s completed, return here. Obviously, you ll need to find some way of getting online to do be able to download using the Synaptic Package Manager. Consider making a direct Ethernet connection to your router, or simply turn off WPA on the router for the duration of the download. Follow these steps to configure WPA: 1. Select System . Administration . Synaptic Package Manager. 2. Click the Search button. Enter wpasupplicant as a search term.