Fwd: Centrino support

[Colin McGregor]

The following question was passed on to me by the
editor of a magazine I have written for. Anyone know
how to make wireless play nice on Linux based Centrino
laptops?

One person (with the luck? / misfortune? to live) in
New Jersry would appreciate an answer.

Colin,

[snip]
> Dear Editor
> 
> I'm so frustrated I had to write this letter. Or
> I'll just stay with  
> Windows and give up on wireless LINUX completely.
> 
> Intel's Centrino equipped laptops seem to be
> COMPLETELY without any  
> workable LINUX support wireless support.
> 
> Centrino hardware config (DELL INSPIRON 9200) =
> Pentium M + IPW2200  
> wireless PCI-mini card + Intel Express Chipset
> 
> None of the LINUX magazines have addressed this
> problem for YEARS!!!
> 
> You can't blame everything on Intel.They seemed to
> have given the  
> hardware info to the community programmers.
> 
> 
> I have tried UBUNTU, FEDORA, DSL, Knoppix, SUSE,
> MEPIS, Debian,  
> Gentoo,Mandriva. All have failed in either not
> finding the card or  
> can't load firmware or software module(s) ending in
> .ko or .so, with  
> an either a -2 or -5 error return codes.
> 
> Running DMESG|grep ieee or DMESG|grep ipw to find
> errors without a  
> way to fix it.
> 
> See
>
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-n/f/viewpost/2433.html
> for some  
> of the typical error messages.
> 
> ALL the sw I have seen have been command line arcane
> commands.
> 
> The XP wireless tools, Intel XP ProSET/Wireless
> software is so  
> sophisticated it shames me as a programmer to see
> how little a laptop  
> rates in the LINUX programming community. And
> Microsoft provides its  
> own wireless tools too.
> 
> WPA2 support doesn't seem to exist without exotic
> additional sw i.e.  
> wpa-supplicant and ndiswrapper.
> What order do these pieces of sw have to be
> loaded???
> 
> This has been a non-issue of all the magazines and
> writes. They are  
> probably using XP wireless to write about LINUX.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Very Disappointed

[snip]
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