Jacobs Weblog

24 Jul 2004

Debian Sarge on IBM X40 howto – Part 4: Wireless

I was really nerveus about getting wireless to work…

Update, 24. July 2004, an hour later: Well it was bound to be an impossible mission from the start. The computer dosn’t even have an Intel fucker of not supported death wireless card I thought it had
What a waste of time.

I have an Atheros (AR5212 802.11abg) card instead.

After googeling I found that my wireless card is an Intel 2200BG which at the time of the writing of the guides I found wasn’t supported very well, but the linked to the ipw2200 site on SourceForge developing the Linux driver. But what the hell – I’ll give it a try… it might work.

There is a few requirements for the driver to work:

• The kernel have to be a 2.6 kernel and have “CONFIGNETRADIO” enabled (CONFIG_NET_RADIO=y). This is all okay if you are using a precompiled kernel from the Debian Sarge archive.
  I used kernel-image-2.6.7-1-686 and the corresponding kernel headers.

• Wireless tools is needed an is apt-getable with the following:

  apt-get install wireless-tools
  

• Source code for the driver downloadable from SourceForge
• Firmware for the wireless card downloadable from the projects website

To compile the source code you also need the packages gcc and make. For a more detailed howto consult the project website.

Now compile the source code:

debian:~# tar xzvf ipw2200-0.2.tgz
debian:~# cd ipw2200-0.2
debian:~# make

Unpack the firmware files to /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware:

moprobe firmware_class

If this isn’t loaded you will get an error like this “-1 Unknown symbol in module“

and finally run :

insmod ipw2200.ko

Well I didn’t get any errors… now I have to figure out how this works Step 2… test that it is actually working.

dmesg dosn’t detect any new ahrdware when I load the modules, so I don’t think that it is working?!