Setting up Intel 2200bg wireless cards
From SUSE Wiki
Type: Howto
Tested Versions: 10.0, 10.1
Written By: Haqdeisel
Further Modifications By: Eduardo Souza [Velhinho]
These instructions are written generally for a Linux newbie, but should be useful (albeit verbose) for a veteran as well. These instructions also assume that you can gain access to the Internet via wired LAN until you get your wireless working.
Note: You will need the following packages from YaST installed:
- gcc
- make
- kernel-sources for your kernel
- wireless-tools
Initial Installation
Installing the firmware is a far less difficult process than the one outlined in the ipw2200 INSTALL file. Here's how it's done:
- Download the latest ipw-firmware RPM file . YaST's Software Manager was not able to find this package when I searched for it. The file is available from SUSE's FTP server at:
- http://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/10.0/inst-source-extra/suse/noarch/ for Version 10.0
- http://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/10.1/inst-source-extra/suse/noarch/ for version 10.1
- Simply select the ipw-firmware package, and download it to your home folder:
- Install the RPM file.
- In KDE on SuSE 10.0, you can do this by simply browsing to the file in Konquerer, clicking it, then clicking "Install Package with YaST". In SuSE 10.1, this can be done easily with zen-installer, by simply double clicking it.
Next, we have to download and install the ieee80211 subsystem. This was the trickiest part of the process for me, because a couple of things can go wrong, but hopefully by using these instructions you will avoid the hassles I ran into.
- Remove prior versions of the subsystem.
- Use your favorite search function to find any instances of the file ieee80211.h in your filesystem, then remove them. Make sure that you remove the file from /usr/src/linux/include/net/.
- Get the latest version of the subsystem. It is available at:
- The site warns users to use a stable version (one ending in ".0"), but at the time of this writing, there were apparently no stable versions available. I used version 1.1.6.
- Unpack the driver files:
- In a console window, "cd" to the directory where you downloaded the .tgz file (i.e "cd ~" if you downloaded it to your home folder), then run:
$ su Password: Enter Root Password Here # tar -xvzf ieee80211-X.X.X.tgz"
- where "X.X.X" is the version number of the driver, in my case "1.1.6".
- Compile the ieee80211 subsystem
- In the same console window, "cd" to the directory to which you decompressed the file above (the default is a ieee80211-X.X.X subdirectory within the same directory the .tgz file is in), and run:
# make
- This will compile the source code for the ieee80211 subsystem. If you get a long list of errors when you run this, beginning with a syntax error in ieee80211_module.c, then you probably have not removed all copies of ieee80211.h from your filesystem. Go back and do so.
- If "make" did not return errors, run:
# make install"
- This will install the ieee80211 subsystem. If you get errors here and every step before this one went OK, make sure you are running as root.
Now, to install the driver. This step is almost identical to step 3, but involves different files.
- Get the latest stable version of the driver. It is available at:
- You may have to click "More" to find a stable version. At the time of this writing, the latest stable version was 1.0.0.
- Unpack the driver files:
- In a console window, "cd" to the directory where you downloaded the .tgz file, then run:
$ tar -xvzf ipw2200-X.X.X.tgz
- where "X.X.X" is the version number of the driver, in my case "1.0.0".
- Compile the driver:
- In a console window, "cd" to the directory to which you decompressed the file above (the default is a ipw2200-X.X.X subdirectory within the same directory the .tgz file is in), and run:
$ su Password: <enter Root Password> # make
- This will compile the source code for the ipw2200 driver.
- If "make" did not return errors, run:
# make install
- This will install the driver.
Testing
Now you should at least have a wireless device, if not necessarily a connection to the Internet. From a console window, run "iwconfig". You should now see a "eth1" device, which represents your wireless card. You should also now be able to use YaST's "Network Card" configuration tool to specify your network's settings, such as the ESSID and the WEP keys. This can also be done through iwconfig. To find out how, please read the man page for iwconfig (run "man iwconfig" from a console window").
