Getting the DWA-125 Wireless Dongle to Work in CentOS 5.8

I use an old IBM Thinkpad X32 which doesn't come with a built-in wireless networking card. Fortunately, I still have my D-Link DWA-125 wireless USB adapter lying around. I used this on a previous computer before and it didn't let me down. I was hoping that this time around, it wouldn't let me down either; and I can say that it didn't as I am typing this post using the successful setup of a wireless connection. This time around, I am using CentOS 5.8 as my operating system. Here's how I got it working.

The Driver

This here is the most critical part of getting your hardware device work on a computer. Again, as I have used this USB adapter before on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, then I know that there is a Linux driver available for it. So the first step is to download these drivers:

[usr@localhost ~]$ wget ftp://www.dlinkla.com/pub/drivers/DWA-125/*LINUX*DWA-125*.tar*gz --directory-prefix=/tmp

The driver is downloaded to the /tmp directory.

Prerequisite

At this point it's quite clear that the driver is in its source code form so it need to be built. To be safe, before attempting the next part of the installation, it's best to install the tool to be used in building the source code. I don't know which exact development tools are going to be used so I installed the "Development Tools" group.

[usr@localhost ~]$ su -c 'yum groupinstall "Development Tools"'

Installing the Driver

Now the source code is downloaded and the tools to build are installed, the last thing to do is to install the driver. And it's all just typing the ff. commands in succession.

[usr@localhost ~]$ cd /tmp
[usr@localhost tmp]$ tar -xzf *LINUX*DWA-125*.tar.gz
[usr@localhost tmp]$ cd 2009_1204_RT3070_Linux_STA_v2.1.2.0
[usr@localhost 2009_1204_RT3070_Linux_STA_v2.1.2.0]$ su -
Password:
[usr@localhost 2009_1204_RT3070_Linux_STA_v2.1.2.0]# make
[usr@localhost 2009_1204_RT3070_Linux_STA_v2.1.2.0]# make install

Starting the Driver

As my computer didn't have a built-in wireless adapter, then I didn't need to blacklist a certain driver from running (PDF). All I needed to do was:

[usr@localhost 2009_1204_RT3070_Linux_STA_v2.1.2.0]# modprobe rt3070sta

A restart should ensure that the driver is started. And that’s it! The driver is now installed and wireless is ready for use.