Intel 2011B under Linux

*** Caution: extremely boring technical stuff below. Don't mess with your eyes unless you're familiar with Linux & programming stuff.


By Intel 2011B, I suggest my Intel® PRO/Wireless 2011B LAN PC Card, which is a PCMCIA wireless card that supports 802.11b. I use it on my laptop (Toshiba Portégé 2000) to access the wireless network.

The Portégé 2000 is an ultra slim, ultra light notebook, even with nowadays standard. However, it sacrifice speed for its size, so the performance of the factory-installed Windows XP on it is not very satisfying. After I installed Fedora Core 3 (FC3), the whole system runs smoothly, but the wireless card isn't working anymore, and the ACPI does not work very well either.

This article tries to explain the procedure to make 2011b works under FC3.

Description:

The orinoco driver provides a good solution to wireless NICs based on this chip-set. However, this driver will not work properly with Intel 2011B by a simple compile-and-install action. This is because Intel does not have the firmware embedded on card, instead they store it in their windows driver, and upload it onto the NIC when it's inserted into the PCMCIA slot. There's nothing wrong with this method, since it could save the extra cost of EPROM. The real problem is: Intel DOES NOT provide driver of 2011b for Linux. SHAME ON THEM.

HOW-TO:

1. Get Orinoco wireless driver first. I used orinoco-0.15rc2.


2. If it does not compile successfully with your kernel 2.6.x, try this patch.
   
   Download the patch, and then save it under the orinoco-0.15rc2 source directory.
   
   Under orinoco-0.15rc2 directory, type the following command:
   
   patch -p0 < orinoco-0.15rc2-2.6.patch


3. Get get_symbol_fw & parse_symbol_fw. Execute them. Now we have spectrum_fw.h. Move it into the source directory.
   (I may not put it on the Internet directly because of legal issues.)


4. Edit spectrum_cs.c, unmark #define SPECTRUM_FW_INCLUDED 1 on line #58.


5. make.make install as root. Done.


6. Insert 2011b. Use dmesg to see if it works.