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.
Leave a Reply