Centrino Wireless on Fedora Core 3

Using Centrino Wireless on Fedora Core 3

See howto http://www.geekspeek.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=40

What follows is a brief how-to on using Intel's Centrino WiFi on Fedora Core 3. The victim for this experiment is a Dell 600M laptop with Intel's Pro/Wireless 2200BG interface.

First off you need to make sure you have the following packages installed, if not you'll need to install them prior to following this tutorial:

Fedora Core 3 with the 2.6.9-1.667 or later kernel

Kernel sources for your running kernel

Wireless Tools (v27 or later)

Basic Development Packages

These packages are all installed by default (with the exception of the kernel sources) if you chose a Fedora Core 3 workstation install. You can get the kernel sources via Yum or by visiting your favorite mirror if you need to.

Next we need to get the IPW2200 driver and binary firmware packages. I used version 0.6 of the firmware and version 0.12 of the driver.

Installing -

Once you have the packages listed above do the following as root:

#tar -zxf ipw2200-0.12.tgz <enter>

#cd ipw2200-0.12 <enter>

#make <enter>

#make install <enter>

Now for the firmware package, still as root do the following:

#mv ipw2200-fw-2.0.tgz /lib/firmware <enter>

#cd /lib/firmware <enter>

#tar -zxf ipw2200-fw-2.0.tgz <enter>

#rm ipw2200-fw-2.0.tgz <enter>

Cool, now we need to create a quick script to load the driver at startup, still as root do the following:

#cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts

#vi ifcfg-eth1

Now insert the following lines:

DEVICE=eth1

ONBOOT=yes

BOOTPROTO=dhcp

TYPE=Wireless

% modprobe ipw2200

% ifup eth1

Thats it, save the file and exit. The interface should now be activated at bootup, and you should now be able to use either iwconfig or system-config-network to specify the wireless settings for your location. Hopefully you found this how-to useful and good luck !.

Written by Rick Nicholas

This works on my Dell D600 as well.