I just set up a laptop running linux and had to get the wireless network card working. I basically followed the installation instructions here. Note the required kernel. I had tried doing this on a rhel4 machine, but it didn’t work until I upgraded to rhel5. Then, there were no problems. I added a script for eth1 in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts, added a line starting the ipw3945d daemon in /etc/rc.d/rc.local and added alias eth1 ipw3945 to /etc/modprobe.conf. After that, the user simply has to issue the following commands to use the network card. ( I added users to the sudoers list so they don’t have to be root.)
sudo /sbin/iwconfig eth1 essid network_name key off
replace network_name with whatever network to connect to
sudo /sbin/dhclient eth1
That’s it. To see the available wireless networks, use:
sudo /sbin/iwlist eth1 scanning