Installing a Cisco wireless card on a RH9 laptop

More and more of us are using Linux on laptops and along with that, I'm sure more folks will be using wireless cards too.

Seeing how I'm no exception to this, I had to install a Cisco Aironet 340 PCMCIA card on a laptop with RH9. Since this is not exactly the most pleasant experience, I figured that I could share a quick and dirty set of install instructions.

1) Download the proper driver from Cisco (will require an account on the site)
2) Make this directory path: /opt/cisco/bin
3) gunzip and untar the drivers in the above directory
4) Go to the sourceforge site www.sourceforge.net and go to the pcmcia project and get the latest build of pcmcia-cs. Currently that file is called pcmcia-cs-3.2.4.tar.gz
5) Gunzip and untar this file in /usr/src/pcmcia
6) Be sure that you have a compiler (such as gcc) and kernel-source RPM installed. If you don't bad things will happen :)
7) Once all of this is done, go to the /opt/cisco/bin directory and type sh cwinstall
8) You will need to provide it with a path to your current browser, the path to the pcmcia card services (which you just dumped into /usr/src/pcmcia) and the path to your Kernel distro (/usr/src/Linux.2.4) I would recommend making a symbolic link to the linux directory so that when you update the kernel you can still find you way to the most current one installed.
9) Once that is done, do this and say yes to the defaults:
make config
make all
make install
10) Once this is done, reboot and then go into xwindows and type /opt/cisco/bin/acu &
This will bring up the configuration utility where you enter your WEP key and other configs.

That should do it.

-Hope this helps!

--TH13