ipw2200 wifi card and wpa encryption (updated)

Sunday, July 23, 2006

ipw2200 wifi card and wpa encryption (updated)

I had some difficulties getting my ipw2200 wifi card to work under linux. Although I found so much info about it on internet, i got a little confused about whats needed to get it working. Anyway thats a past now... here is a how-to.

Firmware
Get firmware from http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net (v2.4)
and extract it to /lib/firmware/

Update:
i upgraded kernel to 2.6.17.6 and card it's not working anymore with firmware 2.4. You have to install FW 3.0 version to get it working again. Previously i was using kernel version 2.6.16.19.

Modules
load modules:

modprobe ieee80211
modprobe ipw2200

and uncomment same lines in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules for automatic loading on startup. (thats for slackware based distros)

you can check now if modules are loaded ok by

dmesg | grep ipw

you should get something like this:

ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, git-1.0.8
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2005 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection

for enabling radio off/on switch add this to /etc/modprobe.conf

options ipw2200 led=1

Configuration (wpa_supplicant is required)

/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf should look something like this:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
	ssid="wlan_name"
	scan_ssid=1
	proto=WPA
	key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
	psk="password"
}

Usage
i hope you have your router setup with wpa encryption and dhcp.
in my case ipw2200 is on eth1

start

wpa_supplicant -B -i eth1 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -D wext
dhcpcd -d eth1

if everything is setup ok you should get an ip from dhcp server.
happy wireless surfing ;-)