I’ve been having all sorts of problems with the Intel PRO/Wireless 2100, the mini-PCI wireless card that comes in the Centrino package. I’ve had 2 notebooks with the same card, the Dell Inspiron 600m and now the IBM Thinkpad T40. They both experienced dropped connections and, more importantly, no Linux support.
I made a call the IBM tech support and complained, and asked politely if I could swap the card with an alternate. Reaching, I asked for the brand new IBM 802.11a/b/g mini-PCI combo card using the Atheros chipset. The IBM website shows a 2-4 week backorder, with 2000+ people in line waiting for this killer card. Surprisingly enough, the tech support said that sounded good, and said I should get it soon. Soon, I thought, would be 2-4 weeks.
You can imagine my surprise when I got a package at 9:45AM this morning. IBM had overnighted me a card from the manufacturer in China. Talk about amazing customer service!
The dissably and installation of the card went smoothly, due mostly to the hardware maintenance manual IBM thoughtfully gives to the customer. IBM also goes the extra mile and offers movies showing the process on their site.
Then I hit a roadblock. There are no drivers listed on IBM’s driver matrix. Or anywhere on the IBM site. I called tech support, and after 30 minutes, and plenty of call escalations I was told there weren’t any drivers. Anywhere. They were stumped.
Desparate, I downloaded the drivers for the old IBM dual-band mini-PCI card. To my surprise, Windows started loading the drivers for a “11a/b/g” card. In less than 15 seconds, I was online with a 54Mbit connection. I called up IBM and let them know where the drivers were hiding, and they passed it onto their tech support managers.
Best of all, there are open-source drivers available for Linux for this card.
IBM rules!
Now if it would only work with a 600m. I’ve been dying for linux support without using a PCMCIA card.
Any of the a/b/g cards with the Atheros chipset will work with the madwifi drivers. For instance, there are a variety of D-Link, Netgear, and Linksys cards that use that chipset. (I can’t remember the exact model numbers right now… but they’re listed in the madwifi README.)
I could not get my a/b/g-mini-PCI – Card working in my R40 under SuSE 9.0.
My card was manufactured by Philips and comes with Atheros Chipset (5211). The madwifi-drivers are not finding any wlan-hardware.
lspci says:
02:02.0 Ethernet controller: Unknown device 168c:1014 (rev 01)
And this device is not listed under the madwifi-drivers. Since August, there were no more work on madwifi.
I am now running the card via driverloader from http://www.linuxant.com. Sounds dirty, to load a windows – driver on linux. But works