BT 5 and onboard Wifi

[godspeed]

Hi,

I've been trying to get BT5 running with my onboard Wifi card. I'm aware that running vmware and BT5 iso will not allow me to use my onboard card. The other option is to boot from a USB but I am learning with tutorials and would like to be able to run other things while running BT5. I am running windows XP. What are my options? I can't seem to come up with a way that doesn't require me to boot it or format to linux permanently. Is there no other way than an external Wifi card?

If that's the case, what's the cheapest and best working Wifi card that I could buy? As in, I'm sure there are a few that are widely accepted here that most people use.

Thanks for any help.

[scottm99]

Onboard wifi can be a funny beast. The hardware compatibility list forums & BackTrack wiki were a big help to me when getting started. Personally, I've always had bad luck with Broadcom chipsets. I own a Hawking HWUG1A & Alfa AWUS036H...both are USB wifi. The Hawking will go into monitor mode fine, but packet injection is hit-and-miss (mostly miss). The Alfa card will do monitor mode & packet injection no problem, out-of-the-box.

For maximum compatibility with BackTrack, I'd go with the Alfa AWUS036H, and install BT in dual-boot. I believe the BT developers recommend the Alfa AWUS036H for the Offensive Security Wireless Attacks course.

[stepking2]

As scottm99 stated, the ALFA AWUS036H is the way to go.
I got mine for 26$ here: http://store.rokland.com/products/al...tenna-awus036h

It's best to use a hard drive install of BackTrack, but a VM should do just fine.
If you are doing a hard drive install you can use the internal adapter, and if you have an Atheros card, everything should work flawlessy!

The reason that you can't use internal wireless card in a VM, is beacuse of the VM treating the card as an ethernet adapter.

[Snayler]

It's best to use a hard drive install of BackTrack, but a VM should do just fine.

Actually, VM installs usually have some issues with AWUS036H (not sure about other cards). There's a list of commands here in the forums to fix the problem (which you'll have to run every time after booting the system), but from my experience, those commands won't solve the problem every time (sometimes I have to run them more than once in order to fix the problem).

[godspeed]

Thanks for the responses guys. I've come to realize that it's pointless to run onboard so I went out and bought a wireless card. I didn't see this thread got accepted by the admins so I created another one with another problem. Hopefully that one gets accepted soon but...

The card I bought is using the chipset RTL8188SU
I am running vmplayer with ubuntu 64bit & gnome 64bit BT5 R2

I cannot for the life of me get this card installed. It is detected on the bottom right on the USB icon but when I run airmon there are no chipsets, and when I run wicd it doesn't show any wireless networks. I have read every single thread tagged "RTL8188SU" and haven't been able to get it to work. Most threads are 1+ years old though. I'm really new to linux which is likely my biggest problem, but damn is there no way to get this working? I know Alfa is best but there are no carriers around me and I didn't want to wait 2 weeks but I will if I have to I guess.

[scottm99]

I've never run the Alfa card in a VM install of BackTrack. Thanks for the info, Snayler

As an aside, I usually have 2 installs of BackTrack: one in a virtual machine, and a dual-boot install with Windows 7. I've always done wireless stuff from my dual-boot install.

[Barry]

What's real fun is when some laptops internal wifi card is actually a usb based wifi card! Then you get the arguments that "yes my internal wifi card does work with backtrack, you just like to screw with the newbs" posts...

[bosanac]

Hello guys
I have the same problem as you, I just bought my new laptop (notebook) HP 650 and on Backtrack 5 my wireless doesn't work (on keyboard is button which don't respond when I tray to activate when I work with Backtrack) so only way is to buy some USB wireless adapter and use them for wireless. But I didn't find which model will work 100% with my HP 650.
PLEASE any help, any suggestion.
I not sure but someone mention TP-LINK TL-WN751ND 802.11b/g/n or TL-WN722N.
I must tell that I don't use installed version of backtrack I just boot from CD, done my job and return to windows.
Any suggestion any help.

Thanks