Ipw2200

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Intel PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Driver for WiFi

Linux driver for the 802.11bg and 802.11abg NICs - miniPCI cards - found in Centrino laptops. This driver only works on 2.6.x kernels (2.6.4 or newer).

The following adapters sold by IBM use these chips:

Project Homepage / Availability

http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/

Packages

Status

in development, usable, WEP 128bit encryption works, WPA does also work with drivers >= 1.0.2 (beta at the moment, use wpa_supplicant for WPA-functionality), Monitor/RFMon is supported as of 1.0.6 and firmware 2.3!

Current Version: 1.0.8

Firmware Version: 2.4

Generally works well, but some users experience problems (especially with firmware restarts and with WPA functionality with wpa_supplicant); see the discussion page for examples.

NOTE!
For kernels 2.6.13 and newer, the ipw2200 release candidates require an updated IEEE 802.11 subsystem, which can be downloaded from the ieee80211 project page.

Power Management

To enable power management, issue:
# iwpriv wlan0 set_power 7
where wlan0 is the name if your interface. This will reduce idle power consumption by several watts compared to no power management.

To disable the radio (and further reduce power consumption) when the card is not in used, issue:
# echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ipw2200/*/rf_kill
To enable the radio, issue:
# echo 0 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ipw2200/*/rf_kill
To make the radio off by default after boot, add

options ipw2200 disable=1

to your /etc/modprobe.conf or equivalent.

See README.ipw2200 in the ipw2200 package for details and other options.

Additional Comments

Make sure you grab the newest version and new loadable firmware as required by the driver. You can found the last firmware here. To install it, decompress the .tgz file into /lib/firmware.

The driver doesn't appear to support MII interface, so any tools like automatic network configuration managers ( whereami ) that rely on mii-tool do not work.