TPLINK TLWN321G on CentOS 5.5

Recently I had to attach the above USB wireless dongle to a CentOS 5.5 machine. It works out of the box for ubuntu as I mentioned here.

For CentOS 5.5 here is what I did to make it work. Got the information from here.

Installed elrepo repository:
rpm -Uvh http://elrepo.org/elrepo-release-0.1-1.el5.elrepo.noarch.rpm

Imported its GPG key
rpm --import http://elrepo.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-elrepo.org

Install driver
yum --enablerepo=elrepo install rt73usb-firmware

Now we need to disable the default network service for centos
chkconfig network off
chkconfig wpa_supplicant off

Let NetworkManager take care of the network
chkconfig NetworkManager on

Reboot. Now move your mouse over the network manager applet in the task bar and you should be able to see a list of all available wireless networks.