We have WiFi!

I had some problems getting WiFi to work on my Fed 9-installed laptop. I have to put my hand up and say that it appears these were largely down to my inexperience using Linux. Here's what I did in between the WiFi not working and the WiFi working. You decide.

First I took some advice from a colleague that I had originally ignored: I updated all the packages in my installation:

# yum -y update

The '-y' just tells it not to stop to ask you any questions - instead it should always assume a 'yes' to any question.

This can take quite some time - 3 or 4 hours in fact so best to leave it running at night.

I'm not at all sure whether this had anything to do with the solution or whether it would have worked with just the next bit.

Next, I fiddled with the network manager applet (top panel, next to your name). This tells you about all the wireless networks detected in your neighbourhood - hopefully one of them will be yours ;) I had entered by ASCII WEP key but I didn't have the right option selected for some reason. For an ASCII WEP key it has to be something like 'Enter WEP key 128 bit ASCII' (or something similar).

That was all I had to do in order to get it working. So I'm using wireless right now to make this post.

It's not difficult - but I can make any simple thing appear difficult!