The Corpus Callosum

For various reasons, I am now mostly using a computer in the living room, rather than the study.  That is fine, but it is far from the cable modem.  That would be no problem, having a wireless card installed.  But the card is a Linksys card that uses a Broadcom chip.  There is no Linux driver.  I am not clever enough to get the Windows driver to work is Linux using ndiswrapper.  I did get to the point where the OS could see the card, but I could not actually get the card to work.  I'm pretty sure that I was getting hung up on configuring the encryption.  I thought briefly about using it without encryption, but that is just not a good idea.

As a result, I was consigned to using Windows for the past couple of weeks.  I wanted to get back to using Linux.  Linux soothes my philosophical dissonance.  

Continue reading below the fold, to see how I got back to my open-source playground.

Hah!  I thought yesterday.  We have an old wireless router sitting around, not being used.  There must be a way to use that router to set up a wireless connection that would use the ethernet port.  Then I would not have to sweat over this nutty ndiswrapper thingy.

The old router we have happens to be a Linksys WRT54gs.  As it happens, Linksys used Linux as the base for the firmware.  When this was discovered, Linksys was forced to divulge the source code, under the terms of the Gnu Public License.  Persons who know what they are doing promptly took that and modified it, to enable the router to do things that one normally had to pay extra for.  

For example, Linksys and others sell wireless ethernet bridges: devices that do what I want done, right off the shelf.  But they won't give me one unless I give them something like $90.  Which I do not want to do.  

So I downloaded the open-source firmware for the router, and installed it, and got it set up.  (The instructions are here.)  Works great.  

Having a stash of extra parts is one of of the keys to happiness in this world.

UPDATE: if you follow the instructions on the Anandtech site, and you get to instruction step #10, you may find that it does not work exactly as written. The author states that you can telnet in to the wireless bridge using the same username and password as you use for the web interface. On my system, you have to use the username "root". The password is the same.