Having gotten nowhere with my IBM T30 laptop and its Cisco Aironet MPI350 wifi card – whose airo driver in openSUSE 11.1 absolutely will not work with any form of WPA encryption >:( – I’m now thinking about trying something else.
I found that there’s a good chance I can get the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG wifi card to work in this laptop with a simple BIOS patch.
I’m willing to risk the $12USD ebay price for one of these cards, and give it a try.
I did some reading of other threads here and it seems that this card will work with WPA encryption (it did under openSUSE 10.x, anyway).
Anyone have this card in their laptop? Can you confirm it works with 11.1 and WPA encryption?
Thanks,
Chuck
Don’t have it. But it’s well reported on in the HCL
Hardware - openSUSE
go to network adapters wireless
Will work with WPA(2), had one from 9.2 to 11.0, never any problems.
In genral, Intel WiFi cards are among the best considering linux support.
Thanks! I totally missed that hardware compatibility page; that was very helpful.
I applied the BIOS patch to my laptop, and ordered a 2200BG card…once it arrives I will try it and report back.
-Chuck
su -c "zypper in ipw-firmware"
might be the (only) thing you have to do.
When installing openSUSE on a machine with an ipw2200-card, the firmware is installed automatically, not sure if YaST will do that if the card is installed later (maybe in 11.1 even that happens automatically).
Thanks for that…since this was a fresh install I figured I would play it safe and just reinstall once the new wifi card was in place.
-Chuck
Completely unnecessary, this is not Windows.
Install the firmware-package now, so you won’t forget it later.
ok, but if I do that are you saying that once the new card is installed the system will sense it and load the correct drivers, etc. Or will I have to manually set up the new card? I’m still a newbie especially when it comes to mucking with /etc/ stuff…
The card will normally work out of the box if the firmware is installed.
Of course you will have to configure it like any new network interface, but that’s really no issue “special” to linux.
sounds good…thank you…yup, I’m now pretty much an expert at configuring via NetworkManager 
Looking forward to getting the Intel card and giving this another try!
-Chuck
Well, just to close the loop on this…my $13 eBay 2200BG card arrived today; popped it into the T30 laptop and it works perfectly with WPA2.
Thanks again for all the help!
-Chuck