How to install an Intel Pro Wireless 2200 on an NC4010 notebook
This page relates my experience when I purchased a new Intel Pro Wireless 2200 mini PCI card for my NC 4010 notebook. New notebooks have now BIOS protections which aims at preventing a user from installing a mini PCI card themselves. The official reason given by HP is that it avoid using innapropriate cards which can damage the notebook but the idea behind this is clearly to "force" the users to purchase the card from them at a higher price. Then, when I installed my new mini PCI (purchased on ebay for less than 30 euros) on my laptop I got the following message at the BIOS check:
104 Unsupported wireless device [Please shutdown]
In the following, we describe how to alter the mini PCI card to make it work on an NC4010. This is based on the discussion that can be found at: http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/
One way to circumvent this problem is to install the mini PCI card after the BIOS check (e.g., when Windows is loading). Another, more convenient solution is to alter some information (in the EEPROM) in the mini PCI card to pretend to be a card purchased from HP, thus to mislead the BIOS check. To this end, we can use the program ethtool using the driver ipw2200 provided by Intel in order to change the EEPROM. However, they did not allow changes to be done on the card EEPROM. Therefore Martin Stachon proposed a patch to make this possible. But this patch was set for an old version of the driver which relied on an old version of the kernel. So I applied the changes to the new version 1.0.6. I used this configuration for my kernel 2.6.12.3 (even though it is not optimal). In order to compile the driver you need ieee80211-1.0.3 package installed on your computer.
First compile the Linux kernel:
Copy the .config in /usr/src/linux
# cd /usr/src/linux # make # make install # make modules_install
Reboot the computer
Download and uncompress the ieee80211 package and go into the ieee80211 directory
# make # make install
Fetch and uncompress the patched ipw2200 and go into the ipw2200 directory
# make # make install
Reboot the computer When the linux loader shows, insert the mini-pci card in your computer. Then load linux.
type:
# iwconfig
you should see something like:
lo no wireless extensions.
eth0 no wireless extensions.
eth1 unassociated ESSID:off/any
Mode:Monitor Frequency=2.462 GHz Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Bit Rate=0 kb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm
Retry limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:on
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
sit0 no wireless extensions.
So your computer recognized the card on eth1. You can use it but you would have to remove and insert the card every time you boot your computer. Now to change the information in the EEPROM (vendor id) of the card, type:
For european cards:
ethtool -E eth1 magic 0x2200 offset 0x8 value 0xf5 ethtool -E eth1 magic 0x2200 offset 0x9 value 0x12 ethtool -E eth1 magic 0x2200 offset 0xa value 0xa ethtool -E eth1 magic 0x2200 offset 0xb value 0x3c
For US cards:
ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0x8 value 0xf5 ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0x9 value 0x12 ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0xa value 0x3c ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0xb value 0x10
Now reboot your computer. You should no longer see the message "104 Unsupported wireless...".
