Centrino WLAN: Intel OSS Driver Installation

First go to the SourceForge homepage of the intel driver and download the latest driver, along with the hostap package and the firmware for the card.

Extract and compile the hostap driver first. A simple

make ; make install 

will do.

Now extract and compile the WLAN driver ipw2100:

make HOSTAP=/PATH/TO/HOSTAP-SOURCES ; make install

Please note: Version > 0.49 does no longer depend on the hostap sources.
We are almost finished :)

Since we are lazy we want our card to be configured automatically when we load the driver.
On Debian SID create the file /etc/modprobe.d/ipw2100 with the following content:

alias eth1 ipw2100
install ipw2100 modprobe --ignore-install ipw2100 ; \
iwconfig eth1 essid YOUR_ESSID key YOUR_WEP_KEY restricted
					

Remember to enter your ESSID and WEP key (if any).

Run

update-modules ; modprobe ipw2100

when you are finished.
If you run iwconfig, its output should look like this:

eth1      IEEE 802.11b  ESSID:"YOUR_ESSID"  Nickname:"ipw2100"
	Mode:Managed  Channel:6  Access Point: xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx  
	Bit Rate=11Mb/s   Tx-Power=32 dBm   
	Retry:on   RTS thr=2304 B   Fragment thr:off
	Encryption key:YOUR_WEP_KEY_IN_HEX   Security mode:restricted
	Power Management:off
	Link Quality:100/100  Signal level:-52 dBm  Noise level:-98 dBm
	Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
	Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:2   Missed beacon:0
					

To auto-load the driver after each reboot, do an

 echo "ipw2100 >> /etc/modules

There's only one thing left to do: To tell Linux how to configure the network for the device (netmask, gateway, ip etc). We do that by editing /etc/network/interfaces. If you are using DHCP, just add the following line to /etc/network/interfaces:

iface eth1 inet dhcp

If you don't use DHCP at home, please read "man interfaces" on how to set ip, gateway netmask etc.

To switch from wired LAN to WLAN one has to stop the wired LAN first and then bring up the WLAN interface, otherwise the routing gets borked:

ifconfig eth0 down ; ifup eth1

Note:

The use of WLAN requires the acpi4asus driver to be loaded and the WLAN button (blue LED) to be active!