Centos wireless for $5

I was at Microcenter the other day an noticed they were selling Gigafast USB Wireless adapters for $5.00 after rebate. I bought one after checking to make sure it was linux compatible. I got home and found the chipset was acutally "zd1215", not the 1211 like the driver info showed. I also found that the driver would not compile on my Centos 4.4 system. I was able hammer out the problems with some help from theloveoflinux. I have only tested this on the Gigafast dongle, but it should work for any 1211b chipset.


cd /root/

wget http://www.prestonmoore.com/images/usbwifi

sh usbwifi


That should do it for the driver installation. The configuration will take some experimentation, but it is not that difficult. I followed the guide written by Ward Mundy here. This is all I had to do to get my system running.

netconfig --gateway=192.168.1.1 --ip=192.168.1.77 --nameserver=192.168.1.1 --netmask=255.255.255.0 --device=wlan0

service network restart

then I add the following line to /etc/rc.local file:

iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed essid "COHNET" key 8367b179c997675f4696969696

That's it. Your system will now connect on boot.



The rebate on the Gigafast USB wifi adapter ends 12/31/2006