CH Magazine | How to enable WiFi on Matriux running inside VMWare

Introduction

One of the most commonly asked question on Matriux forums and IRC is how to enable and work with WiFi on a Matriux instance running inside VMWare or any other virtualization software. This tutorial will take you step by step on how to do that.

For this tutorial, I am running VMware® Workstation on a Windows 7 Enterprise N Edition which is my Host machine. The Matriux is (obviously) my guest operating system running “Krypton” v1.2. I am using a D-Link DWA-125 Wireless N 150 USB Adapter for this tutorial.

Procedure
There are so many methods and approaches to enable Wi-Fi inside VMWare / Virtualization environment. One of the preferred approaches is explained below:

Note: Do not connect the Wireless Adapter now.
Start Windows 7 (or your Host OS).
Start VM Ware and boot Matriux.
After you login and obtain an IP, if you execute ifconfig -a, by default you will see only two interfaces i.e., eth0 and lo.

8:22 [email protected](none) /root# ifconfig –a
 eth0      Link encap:EthernetHWaddr
 aa:00:04:00:0a:04  
 inet addr:192.168.116.130  
 Bcast:192.168.116.255  
 Mask:255.255.255.0
 inet6 addr: fe80::a800:4ff:fe00:a04/64 
 Scope:Link
 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  
 Metric:1
 RX packets:34 errors:0 dropped:0 
 overruns:0 frame:0
 TX packets:119 errors:0 dropped:0 
 overruns:0 carrier:0
 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
 RX bytes:4731 (4.6 KiB)  TX bytes:11021 
 (10.7 KiB)
           Interrupt:19 Base address:0x2000 
  lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
 inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
 inet6addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
           UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
           RX packets:52 errors:0 dropped:0 
 overruns:0 frame:0
           TX packets:52 errors:0 dropped:0 
 overruns:0 carrier:0
 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
           RX bytes:6688 (6.5 KiB)  TX bytes:6688 
 (6.5 KiB)

Now Connect your USB WiFi Adapter to your PC / Laptop.
If you get a Driver Software Installation error or information window (as shown below), click on the Close button to proceed.

Figure 1

Now the USB Wifi device is available for VM.
You can verify this by switching to VM and clicking on the menu VM -> Removable Devices.
You can see the USB WiFi Device listed there as shown below:

Figure 2

Also, if you move the mouse over the VM Status Bar USB icons, you can see the USB WiFi Device listed there (as shown below):

Figure 3

• Click (or right-click) on the USB Wifi Icon on the VM and click on “Connect (Disconnect from Host)” as shown below:

Figure 4

The following Message Window should appear. Click OK to proceed.

Figure 5

• If you look at the VM Status bar, you can see that the USB WiFi Icon is now active and highlighted as shown below:

Figure 6

Now your USB WiFi adapter is ready for your Matriux WM and you can verify the same using the ifconfig -a command. The output is displayed below:

8:52 [email protected](none) /root# ifconfig -a
 eth0      Link encap:EthernetHWaddr
 aa:00:04:00:0a:04  
 inet addr:192.168.116.130  
 Bcast:192.168.116.255 
 Mask:255.255.255.0
 inet6 addr: fe80::a800:4ff:fe00:a04/64 
 Scope:Link
 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  
 MTU:1500  Metric:1
 RX packets:107 errors:0 dropped:0 
 overruns:0 frame:0
 TX packets:300 errors:0 dropped:0 
 overruns:0 carrier:0
 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
 RX bytes:11883 (11.6 KiB)  TX 
 bytes:20639 (20.1 KiB)
 Interrupt:19 Base address:0x2000
 lo        Link encap:Local Loopback 
  inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0  
             inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
 UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  
             MTU:16436  Metric:1
 RX packets:52 errors:0 dropped:0 
             overruns:0 frame:0
 TX packets:52 errors:0 dropped:0 
             overruns:0 carrier:0
             collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
 RX bytes:6688 (6.5 KiB)  
 TX bytes:6688 (6.5 KiB)
 wlan0     Link encap:EthernetHWaddr
 f0:7d:68:62:b9:ab
 BROADCAST MULTICAST  
 MTU:1500  Metric:1
 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 
 overruns:0 frame:0
 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 
 overruns:0 carrier:0
 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000

Conclusion
The rest I leave it to your WiFi zeal. Now you can do all your WiFi experiments with Matriux from within your Virtual environment.
Join us for more discussion on Matriux and WiFi topics at http://forum.matriux.com or http://is-ra.org/forum/.
Happy Learning!
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