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.

Original post:
I have had a couple of oppurtunities to try and install the Hawking HWP54G Wireless PCI Desktop Network Adaptor with my Fedora Core 4. My version uses the RaLink rt2500 chipset. So far it hasn’t worked. According to what I’ve seen on the support boards at the rt2x00 SourceForge project, others have been able to install the drivers with FC4, but there have been a variety of problems encountered. I’ve managed to find descriptions of problems similar to what I’m seeing, and am trying the proscribed solutions.

I spent too much time at first trying to learn the ins and outs of yum, FC4′s software management system, because I was anticipating needing to install qt like I had to in FC3. Turns out all I needed to do was doubleclick the rpm while viewing the contents of the install DVD, and then I found that under FC4 it is recommended to use the system network configuration tools instead of the config utility that came with the drivers (which is what I needed qmake for in the first place.)

Likewise, when I was unable to even make the driver, I learned that I needed to install the kernel development rpm. I used the same technique, and I hope I picked the right kernel development package. I got two warnings, but the make went through. The RT2500 driver showed up in the network configuration, but it still doesn’t work. I am trying to tweak the settings to enable access to my WAP, but so far have not had success. I can’t tell whether the driver is failing to install or if something is keeping me from connecting.

Posted by Greg as Hardware & Drivers, OS at 11:31 PST

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Gotta take a time out from trying to get that rt2500 driver installed on my brand-new FC4. I’ve been working at it so hard I’ve only caught a peep of the post-blacked-out-game telecast of the Chargers-San Francisco game, and that hasn’t exactly cheered me up. A lot of it was trying to relearn my Linux basics – I have not been a good boy in my stated goal of moving away from Windows. I keep using Windows because the XP login screen is what I see whenever I sit down (all right, I just know it better), but now that I’ve moved Chelsea’s computer upstairs, I’ve got an open slot on my KVM switch. I want to build a Linux webserver – maybe I should build the best Windows machine I can from available parts and turn my nice 3.2 GHz box into that server I want – and use it as my primary. I would only have to switch the KVM back when I was done, for Raquel. She probably won’t even notice the diffference – all she does is surf.

Posted by Greg as Hardware & Drivers, OS at 00:45 PST

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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.

Original post:
I’ve gotten so blasé about installing Linux that I am looking for something to keep me occupied during the process – such as rebuilding a partially disassembled computer of unknown origin.

Last night I got the chance to burn that downloaded dvd iso of Fedora Core 4 that has been sitting in my downloads folder for a couple of weeks. I’ve been without FC3 on my computer since I attached my LCD flatscreen (the beginning of July), and I never did get my Hawking HWP54G PCI wireless access card working under SuSE. So rather than troubleshoot the FC3, which I’ve never had to do after installing new hardware (although I’m sure it’s not hard – it’s just a little tough to learn when you don’t have I/O), I decided to take the opportunity to upgrade. There’s only been one thing holding me back from this decision – having to reinstall the RaLink rt2500 drivers for the Hawking. I know I can do it – I did it before, and knew a lot less then than I do now – but this time I’ll have to write down each and every little step I take until it works.

You see, the number one search word that leads people to my website is “hwp54g”, followed closely by “linux” and an assortment of modifiers. The number one post visited is my crappy description of how I got the damned thing working. I also remember how my inability to get a cheap wireless network card working with Linux prevented me from really trying to switch over to that OS for literally years. And I would really like to come up with a better, more detailed, step-by-step description of how to do it than the aforementioned post, which is really only a reproduction of my thread of pleading posts from the SourceForge forum for the rt2x00 drivers project (which is now hosted at serial monkey’s site.) And yeah, it would be nice to have something that didn’t include my stupid newbie questions like “what does ‘$’ and ‘#’ mean on the command line?”

So I’m going to do this thing, and I need to do it by Friday night, because that’s when my wife comes back from her trip to show off Boo to her old friends in Laughlin. Right now is a rare time for tackling involved projects that I’ve had sitting on my to-do list.

I installed the FC4 a couple of times last night, overwriting the FC3 and using the same partitions. The first time everything went fine, but I elected not to replace the bootloader that SuSE had installed – the same GRUB, but with nicer graphics and a cute visual countdown during the time I have to select the OS I want to boot to. I also did this because I recalled the problems I had with GRUB after installing a second Linux. I really should have canceled the installation at that point and started it again after I had gone back and found the boot options I had for SuSE, because I should have known it was going to get messed up. But I didn’t, so when I rebooted, my old grub.conf tried to launch FC4 with FC3 options. I rediscovered the same old problem again and ultimately reinstalled FC4 fresh with the bootloader, so I still need to fix the SuSE boot options now.

Maybe I would have taken a different tack if I hadn’t been distracted by my rebuild. It started off looking like a simple reassembly, but when I got done and plugged it in, nothing happened, except that I saw the light go on on the network card. So it became a troubleshooting job, and I started by unplugging everything. It was the power supply, although it hadn’t completely failed. I had another one that had been stashed away forever, but when I pulled that one out, it was even more dead. Rats. I still don’t even know if the motherboard/cpu works, but a dead 200W power supply with as many accessories as this box has is encouraging. I want to use this box as a free-standing Linux webserver. Now that will force me to learn more!

Posted by Greg as Hardware & Drivers, OS at 09:08 PST

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Today (technically yesterday), on the way home from work, I stopped to pick up my birthday present from my Mum and Dad. I had to wait until after dinner and then for Boo to fall asleep to play with it, but it was worth it!

I’m looking at the ‘net now through my brand new 19″ flatscreen. I bumped the resolution up from my normal 1024 x 768, which I have been using both at home and work for years, to 1280 x 1024, and I feel like a kid in a candy store. Thanks Mum & Dad!

I have typically upgraded or added features piece by piece but the monitor has always been low on my list. I’ve always been perfectly happy with whatever 17″ (and sometimes 15″) that I could get my hands on. But I see now that I’ve made a serious mistake. True, the couple of hundred bucks I could have spent on a bigger monitor have bought me a lot of hard drives, memory and cpu upgrades over the years, and I never knew what I was missing. But that’s all over now.

This is going to make it a serious drag for me at work now. I’ve been cursing that old 600 MHz NT 4.0 128M ram machine for its slowness ever since I built my 3.2 GHz machine at home, but now the screen is going to suck as well! At least I can use it to look at my site and get some perspective when I want to cram more stuff in than will show well on smaller resolutions. Or am I an old dinosaur for sticking with the 1024 x 768? It’s hard to know – my boss still uses 800 x 600 and it drives me nuts when I sit down at his machine to investigate whenever he wants to know if the latest minor malfunction is really his boss spying on him.

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends, Hardware & Drivers at 01:39 PST

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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.

I have written a much better post on this subject that provides more details and tons of links. I had to finally edit this post because of the traffic I’ve been getting due to my prominent position when someone searches Google using the terms “hwp54g” and “linux”. Since I seem to keep adding details on this subject, this saved search will call up all my posts in reverse chronological order.

Here’s my original post that the search engines found:

I checked my stats page and saw a lot of hits from people looking for info on setting up the Hawking HWP54G wireless adapter under linux. If you need help, feel free to contact me at greg_at_gregrperry_dot_com. I searched my own site and only found vague references to it – I had gotten the job done just days before I started this blog, and wrote about it at SourceForge!

Here’s a reproduction of the thread (complete with typos,) which can be found here. I’m “altjira.”

By: altjira – altjira_
linux newbie / hwp54g / connected? but no joy
2005-04-19 18:03
Linux wannabe newbie but problems with connecting through wireless have kept me from freedom from ****ing Windoze. After a series of frustrating wireless experiences (RH9, Knoppix 3.1 – SpeedStream 1024, DLink DWL-520, Hawking HWP54G), I have been pushed to the point of (sob) asking for help.

I have a new self-built mono 3.2 GHz 800 FSB 160G hd with the Hawking. I feel insulted that the XP Pro I paid $120 for works just fine, but the FC3, SuSe 9.1, and Knoppix 3.7 fails to connect through my wireless network to the Internet. I’m trying to get everything up and running with FC3. I identified the rt2500 chip in the HWP54G, have searched your forums, downloaded 1.1.0 b2, found fstab and loaded my fat32 share partition (so I can access downloads), installed qt, made and installed the rt2500 module and RaConfig [kudos to serialmonkey and his "ifconfig ra0 up" advice ( hope you enjoyed your honeymoon)], and I am at the point where RaConfig runs, sees my AP and seems to connect, but leaves me with “www.xxx.x could not be found” when I try to run Mozilla. I thought maybe I was screwing up the 128 bit WEP encryption, but freeloading on my neighbor’s unsecured access gives me the same results.

HELP!!!!!

One thing I noticed using iwconfig is that the 128 bit key keeps changing whenever I use RaConfig, but this seems to be a side issue considering I cannot connect to the unsecured network.

Please save me from Bill Gates serfdom and tell me what to do next.

By: IvD – ivd
RE: linux newbie / hwp54g / connected? but no
2005-04-20 09:00
does the file /etc/resolv.conf
contain your IP addresses for the DNS servers…

By: altjira – altjira_
RE: linux newbie / hwp54g / connected? but no
2005-04-21 00:18
I see it but get an error message “Couldn’t display /etc/resolve.conf”, even when logged on as root. It is zero bytes in size, so it can’t contain anything.

By: IvD – ivd
RE: linux newbie / hwp54g / connected? but no
2005-04-21 02:02
Then that is your problem.
Put the following data in that file:

nameserver <ip address DNS 1></ip>
nameserver <ip address DNS 2></ip>

By: altjira – altjira_
RE: linux newbie / hwp54g / connected? but no
2005-04-21 17:14
I filled in resolve.conf but still no joy. I see darknight’s thread for installing to FC3, which is completely different than anything I ever tried, and I will attempt to follow it. First, 2 stupid questions, anyone:

1. When you download and make a module, where do you put it in the filesystem? I unzipped the tarball in my user home folder, but since I can’t tell when I need to be root or not, now I can’t even access anything as user without chown. Also, it just seems to be a dumb place to put files required for operating my hardware.

2. I have used command lines since before MSDOS existed, but there is perhaps a notational device I have noticed but don’t understand- when describing commands, there is frequenctly a “$” or “#” sign as the first character. Do you type that in or does it just indicate the required user status?

By: DarkKnight – darkknight_9
RE: linux newbie / hwp54g / connected? but no
2005-04-22 00:19
ok .. the $ and the # tell you whether you are in normal user mode or root user mode. When you open up a shell, as a normal user, you get something like:

[darkknight@darkworld ~]$

notice the “$” for a regular user. Now when I become “root”

[darkknight@darkworld ~]$ su
Password:
[root@darkworld darkknight]#

The prompt changes to “#” to reflect that you are root! So, you don’t need to type in the “$” or the “#”, it’s just there to tell you when you need root privileges to run some command.

When you unzip the archive, it just unpacks the source files. You need to run “make” to make the module. Then the “make install-fedora” (as root) will take care of installing that module in the proper place for you. Once that’s done, you can even delete the source files if you want!

But from experience, once I manage to build a module that works for a particular kernel, I backup the “rt2500.ko” and the “Makefile” so that I can restore it at a later point if need be.

Of course, when you change the kernel, you will again have to get the sources, make, make install-fedora…

By: DarkKnight – darkknight_9
RE: linux newbie / hwp54g / connected? but no
2005-04-22 00:23
An additional comment: I also noticed that it kept changing the WEP Key from time to time .. this problem was solved after I removed the file in /etc/Wireless/ and used _only_ the fedora net configuration tool (system-config-network) to setup all the parameters.

By: altjira – altjira_
RE: linux newbie / hwp54g / connected? but no
2005-04-23 14:26
Joy!

Thanks for all the help. I am logged on for the first time through my home wifi using Linux.

Darknight’s advice was very helpful, but I could not make the latest cvs. Here’s how I did it:

I used tengel’s advice on cleaning out all my mistakes: http://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=2963289, but noted that rt2500 info was in eth1 files and deleted those too.

I made and installed the 1.1.0-b2 beta module. Wish I had have gone down to the bottom of the readme file before and found the FC3 instructions.

I used FC’s System Setting>Network and “New” to create a wireless connection. The first time I tried, I had “rt2500″ to pick from. That didn’t work, but it was because wlan0 wasn’t up. I used
# /sbin/ifconfig wlan0 up
to get it going. Then, to make sure, I deleted the wlan0 wireless device in Network Configuration and added a new wireless device as wlan0. This time I had a full description-
RaLink Ralink RT2500 802.11 Cardbus Reference Card
I then double-clicked the wlan0 device to get the Wireless Device Configuration. Under the Wireless Settings tab, I set the BSSID, the channel and the key, but it still didn’t work until I changed the Mode from Auto to Managed.

Every time I boot up I hav to go root and type
ifconfig wlan0 up
but then I can use FC’c Network tool to active the wireless network. If I tell it to activate when compute starts, it fails.

This leaves out a lot of what I went through to get the card up and running. For other people with problems, I’d highly recommend going to the rt2X00 SourceForge project site and, if necessary, contacting SerialMonkey, the project admin.

I’ve got lots more to write about when I get the time, but noticing the ralink hits made me feel obligated to get this post in.

Posted by Greg as Hardware & Drivers, OS at 16:49 PST

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