Mini-PCI (wireless) cards and compability

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2007 at 11:40:14PM +0000, Tyler Aviss wrote:
> I recently tried to upgrade the wireless card in my laptop from an
> annoying broadcom 802.11b card which requires ndiswrapper to a
> wonderful Intel ipw2200 card that has native linux drivers (and
> supports wireless G). Unfortunately, my laptop - an HP Pavillion
> zd7000 - complained loudly about having an "unauthorized card" at the
> bootup screen, and I had to go back to the broadcom.
> 
> My assumption had been that mini-PCI was much like any other PCI
> standard, though for mobile devices but it appears I am was mistaken.
> Does anyone know about what locks a mini-PCI device to its hardware,
> and how to tell what (if anything) is usable? The Intel card I got was
> from/for a Dell, so I'm wondering if perhaps one from/for an HP would
> work?

The new card would almost certainly work in the laptop.  Unfortunately
it isn't the card HP got the laptop certified for FCC emisions with, so
they won't allow you to install it since you just might violate FCC
emissions standards and they couldn't be responsible for letting you do
that could they?

Some laptop makers aren't as stupidly paranoid about things, but
HP/Compaq most certainly is (I looked into it for my wife's compaq which
has a crappy 802.11b/g broadcom, and found quickly that people said it
can't be done).

Well if you can somehow hack the bios code you should be able to do it.

--
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists