Can't see my wireless internal card on BackTrack 5

Question

I have BackTrack 5 R3 installed on VMware and it's on bridged connection so it gets its own IP on my network and it works. I get internet connection but there is no ethernet cable connected yet somehow when I do iwconfig I can't see wlan0 and no other wireless card but etho is connected to the network somehow... Can't it be that eth0 is my wireless card which is somehow misconfigured? It's an Intel centrino advanced n 6205.

Solution 1

You need to give backtrack (vmware guest os) dedicated exclusive access to the Card. You can't do this with a builtin (minipci-e) card, as far as I know. VMware allows you to give USB devices (such as a usb wifi card) exclusive access. When you do this, Windows Reads your device as "VMware USB device" and doesn't interact with it, while the Guest OS has dedicated access.

Solution 2

Your host system sees both your wireless card and the virtual ethernet adapter that is used to bridge networking with the VM, and the guest system (Backtrack) simply sees the virtual ethernet adapter. It is the host OS that is transparently bridging/routing packets between this virtual interface and the wireless card.

Comments

[Tomer]

I see, so how can I install the wireless card on backtrack too?

[user1984103]

@cloneman's answer is as much as I know in that regard.

[GeorgeW]

can u give some pointers to how to get VMware to get USB wifi card exclusive access? so that it will show up a true wifi adapter in a VMware network setting. Thanks,