Getting WPA Working with a Thinkpad T42 and Knoppix 5.1.1

Ibm Technical
2007-11-10

Thinkpad problems mean that I’m currently borrowing a T42 from work. It took me a while to get WPA working with Knoppix 5.1.1. Here are the magic incantations required:

wpa_passphrase YOURSSID YourWPAPassPhrase > /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
wpa_supplicant -ieth1 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf &
ifup eth1
pump -i eth1

Replace eth1 in the list above with whatever network interface name Knoppix has assigned to your wireless card (reading through the output of dmesg should help you with this). Don’t forget to double-check that your router has the MAC address of the card (use ifconfig to find this) if you’re using MAC address filtering.