Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Setup of a Wireless Connection on a Lenovo T400 running centos 5.3

I recently installed Centos 5.3 on my Lenovo T400, and everything pretty much worked except for the wireless connection. I had a hard time finding instructions on how to get it working but this blog entry was most helpful.

First make sure the RPMForge repo is installed

rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
yum clean all
yum update

Next install the driver for the PRO/Wireless 5100 AGN[Shiloh] card from Intel

yum install iwl5000-firmware

The wireless device should now be working, and you can enable the NetworkManager to start using it

chkconfig NetworkManager on
service NetworkManager start

and you may want to save yourself some wait time at boottime by disabling the network since you don't need that anymore

chkconfig network off

Next you need to configure your wireless connection settings by going to System > Preferences > More Preferences > Network Connections



Select the Wireless tab and click on Add, and fill out your connection settings.

2 comments:

Le Quick Brown Fox said...

Thanks a lot for posting this. I am about to try it out using the x386 version. Just what I needed, and very timely too.

Anonymous said...

That was a great help thanks, just used this to get a T400 working with Centos 5.5. Used i386 which I got from here >>> http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.i386.rpm