Linux® For Dummies®, 8th Edition

Chapter 19. Ten Steps to Making Your Own Wireless Access Point

In This Chapter

Hello, Master Steps to making a wireless access point Troubleshooting

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

—Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio

The wireless phenomenon has hit just about everywhere. You can now change TV channels, answer the phone, or start your coffee maker from just about any place in the house. Wireless technology has also invaded the computer world.

Back in the old days (the early 2000s), you had to run cables all over your house in order to connect multiple computers to the Internet. Now you can use wireless technology to send and receive packets (chunks of data traveling over a computer network) from any computer without having to poke holes in any walls.

You can now purchase a wireless access point (WAP) from just about any electronics store. A WAP connects to your wired network, and then produces radio signals throughout your house (and even outside your house for a small distance). Computers with wireless cards can receive those signals and connect to the wired network.

As we mentioned in Chapter 9, Fedora supports many wireless cards as a client if you already have a wireless access point on your network. But what ...