Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 mini-pci network card

The Asus M2N series of laptops have an integrated wireless network card. It is an Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 mini-pci card, which supports 802.11b at 11Mbps.
Initially I used an ndiswrapper type driver from linuxant.com, which I even paid for. I think it is the first time in many many years I have paid for a piece of software 🙂 It served me well, though, until I bought a 802.11g PCMCIA card.
There’s also a free ndiswrapper driver, which I haven’t tried.
Anyway, at some point in time Intel finally got around releasing a free native Linux driver for the PRO/Wireless 2100 card.
Besides following the instructions, I only had to make one change. My kernel doesn’t have some code to download firmware to the wifi card, so I had to edit the Makefile and uncomment the line

CONFIG_IPW2100_LEGACY_FW_LOAD=y

After a “make” and a “make install” I could load the driver with

modprobe ipw2100

which gave me this in my kernel log:

ieee80211_crypt: registered algorithm 'NULL'
ieee80211: loading with WEP enabled.
ipw2100: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2100 Network Driver, 0.51
ipw2100: Copyright(c) 2003-2004 Intel Corporation
ipw2100: Compiled with LEGACY FW load.
ipw2100: 01:05.0: Detected at mem: 0xFF7FF000-0xFF7FFFFF -> e01bc000, irq: 5
eth1: Using legacy firmware load.
eth1: Bound to 01:05.0

The driver automatically associates with the nearest access point, but in understands the commands of the wireless extensions, so it can be configured with iwconfig.


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