How I got my Hawking HWP54G PCI wireless card working with Linux, and links to drivers, instructions and forums so that you can do it too.

If you came here through a search engine link, you should try my updated post for more details and tons of links.

(This, I guess, is going to be my standard intro whenever I discuss this topic.)

On the lighter side, yesterday I was contacted directly by someone who was trying to get his Hawking HWP54G PCI wireless card working with Linux, in this case Slackware 10.1. It’s the first time anyone other than a friend has asked me for advice about Linux, and I feel like I’ve now been inducted into the Linux community at large. It’s especially interesting that this user contacted me from Italia. With David’s permission, I have posted the entire email exchange.

I’m assuming David found me through a search engine. Like I’ve said before, search engine hits involving some permutation of “linux” “hawking” “hwp54g” and distro names are the biggest source of traffic to my website. (Well, except for a couple of weeks earlier this month, when my post on mpip.org made my Cancer Survivor post the number one entry point outside of feeds and bot crawls.) I checked my logs and in the last two days I got two redirects from google.it using the terms “driver fedora ralink” and eleven from google.com that included “hwp54g”. So I ran the google.it search myself and saw that I was ranked number 9 out of 9,260 hits, and on google.com I’m 16th out of 11,900 for “hwp54g” and 6 out of 554 for “hwp54g linux”. Pretty cool! It’s amazing how much higher I appear in the Google search results since my site went from a RageRank of 2 to a 3, something I didn’t discover until a friend looked for my blog and told me that I was the number one result for “greg perry san diego”, out of 1,790,000! That was November 1st, and I hadn’t bothered to check my PageRank for three months. I’ve been meaning to crow about this since then, which shows how busy I’ve been.

Posted by Greg in Hardware & Drivers, My Website, Networking, OS

No Comments »