Intel PRO Wireless 2200BG on Linux (ipw2200)

I’ve whined for some time now about the lack of support for my wireless card - the Intel Pro Wireless 2200BG - on Linux. It’s an increasingly popular piece of hardware because it’s part of the core of the Centrino system and is a stock part of many new systems being built by Dell and other large manufacturers. Besides being popular it’s also an excellent wifi card that uses low power and supports the 802.11b and 802.11g protocols.

The problem with this card is that Intel has only released binary drivers for it. It works beautifully on Windows, but any other system requires some sort of hacking of the driver. There’s a sourceforge project that seeks to hack this binary driver well enough to create open source drivers, but despite the hard work of the people who develop the ipw2200 driver for Linux there’s still a long way to go with the development.

what we can do
There is enough development in the ipw2200 project to get most of us off the ground and running. Suse 9.2 and onward, for example, has enough of an implementation of this driver to allow wifi networking as soon as it is installed.

Here’s what you’ll need (you may already have some or all of these installed)
Wireless Extensions and Tools
The IPW2200 Driver
The IPW2200 Firmware (firmware is software that’s on your hardware)

Some articles on setting up the drivers on various systems:
on Fedora Core 2
on Fedora Core 3
on Suse (older versions or for upgrading)
The IPW2200 Install Guide

remaining problems
There’s still a lot of work do be done on this driver. On Suse 9.2 (with the default driver version) there is the tendency for the whole system to freeze when there’s too much wireless network activity. The workaround is to make sure I’m set at 802.11a and I don’t use too many programs, but it’s still a very critical problem. If this is happening to you the best bet is to upgrade the driver and hope for the best.

Good luck getting your wireless cards to work. Please leave comments if you have any experience with this problem or are looking for more of a solution (comments only take a second).