Linux Centrino WiFi


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Hello,

A couple of days ago, I installed Linux on my new laptop (Acer Travelmate 803LCib, Centrino). Everything went quite fine. Had some work with ACPI, but that also seems to be ok now. First I installed MDK9.2, but I switched today to the brand new Mandrake 10.0 Community Edition, because of its better kernel (2.6.3).

I would like to go online using the intel 2100 pro wlan card, which is part of the Centrino technology. I know there's been a first release of a native linux driver for this card, and I've been taking a look at it (I didn't install it yet). I also now there is an other possibility to make this card work, using Windows drivers (Linuxant Driverloader or ndiswrapper).

- Option 1: The Linux driver

This driver seems very basic to me. I think it's better to wait a bit, and to download a release in a couple of days/weeks?

An update of the firmware was also necessary? Is this really needed? Is this safe to do, or is there a risc of screwing up my wifi card...? I would like to keep using it under Windows too...

- Option 2: ndiswrapper

I've tried this, but I didn't succeed to get a connection.... Don't know what went wrong....didn't really get errors, but it couldnt find my network...

- Option 3: linuxant software

I tried it once, and it worked (for a while). Because this is no free software I tried to make it work with ndiswrapper (doing the same things as I did when configuring linuxant driverloader). By trying this, I must have screwed it all up :huh:

I reinstalled MDK9.2, but couldn't make it work again... I didn't try it yet on MDK10.

So, al tips and tricks to make this wlan card work are very much appreciated! I'm still quite new to all this more advanced things, but I learned a lot already...

Thanks a lot!

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The Linux driver is only good for unencrypted access points, it only supports that so far. You do not need new firmware, rather, the driver loads the firmware into the chip each time it is started. I use ndiswrapper on my Acer Aspire 2001lci (Centrino), and it works perfectly under Fedora with a custom 2.6.3 kernel. I think its more of setting up the connection problem than a driver one. Have you tried doing it in command line?

ie.

iwconfig wlan0 mode managed

iwconfig wlan0 channel 6

iwconfig wlan0 ESSID whatever

etc...

Also, make sure the driver is set up via its own install script, as it makes sure the driver gets loaded and the windows drivers get copied to the right place.

Edited by zivan56
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I also think its a configuration problem...

At the command line I did:

> the steps as described in the install guidelines (shellscript for installing the basic software worked :) )

> iwconfig eth1 essid mynetworkname (worked with driverloader too)

> iwconfig eth1 key open my128bitkey (")

> ifconfig eth1 up

> dhclient eth1 (==> get no ip....)

When I do iwconfig to see some information about my wlan card (eth1), it says Link Quality: 0/100 ; but I think it's just because it's configured not correctly to see the network. It worked (temporaly...) correctly using the driverloader, and it works perfectly using WinXP.

I've also seen that, when trying to get an ip, it's sending requests to 255.255.255.255. In Windows ipconfig I see the subnetmask (I guess this is the thing he's trying to find?) is 255.255.255.0 . How can I change that value?

An other thing I saw is:

When I followed the steps in the install guidelines, I do at a certain moment modprobe ndiswrapper. Then the wlan-led turns on, no problem. After that there's the step where you have to specify the vendor number, device number, path to sys and inf files. Then I get an error: device or resource busy. Should I do this before loading ndiswrapper, and is the order in the installation guidelines wrong?

Thanks!

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I've also seen that, when trying to get an ip, it's sending requests to 255.255.255.255. In Windows ipconfig I see the subnetmask (I guess this is the thing he's trying to find?) is 255.255.255.0 . How can I change that value?

If your subnet is not correct, you can change it in the ifconfig command. In your case, the iwconfig command should do it. Try a man iwconfig and see how it is done. Pretty simple, as you just pass the subnet paramteter. I think you can do it by specifying subnet, though I have ususally done it by listing the IP as 148.93.55.222/17, which says to use a 17-bit subnet mask. (255.255.128.0) -- Note that this is on a network where I had static IPs.

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I downloaded ndiswrapper version 0.5 compiled and installed it. When I was configuring settings using iwconfig, I added iwconfig wlan0 channel 11 + key and ssid.

Now it works! :D

Thanks for all tips and help :)

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