- Making Wireless work on your laptop (or desktop)
- Wireless firmware
- Tested hardware
- Intel Pro Wireless 2100 (ipw2100)
- Intel Pro Wireless 2200 (ipw2200)
- Intel Pro Wireless 3945 (iwl3945)
- Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN (iwl4965 and iwlagn)
- Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link AGN 5100, 5300 and 5350 (iwlagn)
- Atheros AR9485 (ath9k)
- Atheros (madwifi)
- How to install wireless driver in RHEL 8 / CentOS 8 Linux
- The built-in way
- The external package way
- Realtek WiFi Driver CentOS 8.x/Stream-8 Installation – Step-by-step
- GNU/Linux CentOS 8.x/Stream-8 Installing Realtek Wi-fi Driver Setup Guide
- 1. Launching Terminal
- 2. Getting Wifi Card Info
- 3. Installing Realtek Wifi Driver
Making Wireless work on your laptop (or desktop)
The kernel shipped with CentOS is not the latest and greatest kernel, it is a known, stable and proven kernel that may be a few years old (depending on the release). Because of this, newer drivers may not be available for this kernel, even though Red Hat does backport newer wireless drivers to their stable kernel.
You can find more information of your wireless hardware from the Linux Wireless website to get more information about the driver and the hardware support. We have listed some hardware that is supported, but would welcome more information to improve this wiki. Although this page concentrates on laptops, much of the material is applicable to any wireless connection, regardless of platform.
Wireless firmware
Some modern laptops require firmware to make the wireless network connection work on CentOS. The main reason for this is that wireless device manufacturers do not allow the free redistribution of the firmware that is required to make the device work.
For this reason CentOS does not ship it by default and your wireless network does not work out of the box. However, the solution is simple.
Tested hardware
Intel Pro Wireless 2100 (ipw2100)
If you have a working network connection and you have RPMforge configured in yum, then it is really simple, just install ipw2100-firmware by doing:
yum install ipw2100-firmware
If you don’t have a network connection, simply download the firmware RPM packages named ipw2100-firmware from RPMforge at http://packages.sw.be/ipw2200-firmware/ on another system and transfer the file using a USB stick. Then install the package manually using: rpm -Uhv
Then just reload the ipw2100 module:
modprobe -r ipw2100; modprobe ipw2100
Your wireless device should be working now. Enable NetworkManager to use it.
Intel Pro Wireless 2200 (ipw2200)
If you have a working network connection and you have RPMforge configured in yum, then it is really simple, just install ipw2200-firmware by doing:
yum install ipw2200-firmware
If you don’t have a network connection, simply download the firmware RPM packages named ipw2200-firmware from RPMforge at http://packages.sw.be/ipw2200-firmware/ on another system and transfer the file using a USB stick. Then install the package manually using: rpm -Uhv
Then just reload the ipw2200 module:
modprobe -r ipw2200; modprobe ipw2200
Your wireless device should be working now. Enable NetworkManager to use it.
Intel Pro Wireless 3945 (iwl3945)
The iwl3945 driver replaces the now deprecated ipw3945 driver. It is included in the CentOS-5 kernels (5.3 or newer, >= kernel 2.6.18-128).