# centrino/intel wlan works using linuxant driverloader!

## tuxlover

This was reported to me today by email:

Centrino (Intel) WLAN works under linux by using the NDIS-Wrapper by Linuxant for linux. This means that you can use the Windows XP drivers.

This thing is not free; there's a 30 day trial version available. They have Red Hat, Suse, and Mandrake binary packages, and sources as rpm, deb, and tar.

Have fun, and post your results. I don't have any kind of access point available to try it unfortunately.

----------

## Rhysem

I'll be giving this a whirl tomorrow when I get a chance. (laptop at home today)

----------

## AlterEgo

[rant]

I really do not like this.

First you pay a manufacturer money for a product for which the manufacturer is too lazy to deliver linux drivers.

Then the Linuxant guys buy a license from that manufacturer in order to obtain the technical specs and engineer the driver (modems) of the wrapper (wlan).

Then you pay for the linux-driver.

So, you pay the manufacturer twice for his bad behaviour. This does not "help" linux one bit further.

Note: I don't blame the Linuxant people for providing the service they do.

Thus: I think it's better to avoid linux-unsupported hardware in advance (if possible). 

[rant off]

sorry....

----------

## carbon

I know, it's all bill gates' fault

blame him, when you got a problem, blame him, makes you feel so much better.   :Laughing: 

----------

## tuxlover

 *AlterEgo wrote:*   

> I really do not like this...
> 
> sorry....

 

Don't be sorry. As already said in some other threads, Intel will provide Linux drivers for their centrino wlan cards at the latest in the first half of 2004. It's just a matter of time.

You're right that hardware like this should be avoided, but I for example bought a centrino notebook solely for the good mobile cpu. It's still good and almost fully supported by Linux, even without wlan (I mean it's still good even without wlan.... sorry it's too late).

The problem comes down to the fact that you cannot really buy a top of the line product if you want to use Linux today. Some very late stuff is just not supported when you buy it. This is especially a problem with notebooks where it's usually smart to buy "the latest and greatest" because you can't easily change parts like on a desktop.

Anyway, I've been running my centrino notebook under Linux since the day I got it, and I'm happy with it  :Smile:  don't really need WLAN Irda and all this stuff...

----------

## MacMasta

I tend to be against using wine-hacks as well, but, all in all, I think it's good.

Simple reason: in my experience, users who are migrated to linux tend to stay there. I believe quite strongly that the linux (strike that; open source *nix) community grows stronger with every user, whether or not they are a old-school unix junky or one of my parents (who I'm considering migrating to gentoo, if it will work for them)

The existence of wine let me finally get rid of my dual-boot setup several years ago; the existence of winex now means that I can do everything I did in windows better in linux (with the exception of matlab and maple, and only because the site liscenses at school are windows versions, to my knowledge) 

Things like crossover office let people get 80% separation from their old environment; the step to "hey, I like everything to be free" is a small one from there. If this new wine hack can get more people on linux, the chances of mfg-supported drivers being released goes up. It amuses me that the eventual goal of companies like transgaming and codeweavers is to put themselves out of business, but I'm fine with that.

Side note: an mfg-supported close-source driver (what these tend to be) is only a half-step in the right direction; I think they will eventually realize that the best model for getting good drivers is community participation. With that said, I stick by nvidia GPUs just because they support linux so amazingly well.

/End of long rambling thought.

~Mac~

----------

## Rhysem

For those who haven't bothered to read the site, this is actually free... at least for now.

----------

## Rhysem

Using gentoo-sources-2.4.20-r8, I got the linuxant driverloader installed. It sees my card. It loads the drivers. I can even set (some) parameters.

But unfortunatly not all. I can't seem to set the essid/freq/bitrate. I can turn things like power management on and off.

Edit: big DOH! Guess who managed to turn off the wireless via function key? When I rebooted (just in case) I noticed it was off in the bios. now I'm waiting on a fsck.

Edit 2: Working. The card defaults to off, so I have to enable it each boot.

But it works, which rocks.

----------

## Rhysem

Well it worked until I locked up hard. I also had a cisco VPN client running, the previuos version of which I knew to lock linux up pretty regularly (but the current version had been okay for me up till now, if it was the VPN client).

----------

## thundersteele

Partially working here.

modprobe driverloader takes some time. Most times it works, sometimes it doesn't find wlan card correctly. One it locked up hard on loading module.

Some of the wireless-tools work, some don't, and sooner or later the PC locks up hard again.

Might be cause of 2.6-test5-love4 kernel, I will keep trying.

As said above, driver is free at the moment, linuxant is trying to get the hardware vendors to pay for development. I would prefer native intel drivers anyway

----------

## Rhysem

Under 2.6 I couldn't get it to detect my card. Gentoo-sources 2.4.20 fixed it for me. I haven't had long lockups, it just works.

----------

## PetDude

Loaded it last night and within 20 minutes I had my D-Link DWL-G520 up and running with 128 bit WEP.  Performance is the same as under Windows XP.

I can't seem to get it to connect in "shared key" authentication mode, but every other function seems to work fine.  I'm quite amazed.  :Smile: 

----------

## thundersteele

little experience Update:

It seems to be working well with 2.4 Kernels (ac-sources). Can't try here, but I don't have any of the issues I had with 2.6 kernel.

----------

## postja

I think I'll avoid using this wrapper for now. I'll just stick to my pcmcia wlan card until intel comes out with the native drivers.

----------

## xunil

Anyone know what the names of the files from the Windows driver I'll need to get this working? I have a Dell, and they repackage the drivers, I think, as the INF files I was able to find don't seem to be working. I'm assuming the real one I want is bundled up somewhere and was unpacked to somewhere in c:\windows (which I've got mounted).

----------

## Rhysem

My machine is a dell as well - just go download the drivers from their website. It's a self-extracting zip file, but you can just unzip it and then there are the files.

----------

## Strips

 *xunil wrote:*   

> Anyone know what the names of the files from the Windows driver I'll need to get this working?.

 

I have dell truemobile 1400 miniPCI and i think the driverfiles are stored default to "c:\dell\xxxx" or something. Thats where I found mine. 

Anyhow, I havent been able to get it working yet. It locks good when I try to load the driver. I'm running 2.6.0 mm-sources test9

----------

## hystrix

Got it working with 2.4.20-gentoo-r7 on a IBM Thinkpad R40

Probably a basic question (Gentoo noob):

What is the proper location for setting iwconfig options?

o  I know that /etc/conf.d/net specifies ifconfig options.

o  I know that the pcmcia wireless utils come with a wireless.opts but this card is mini-pci and I don't start pcmcia.

o  I also know that the linux-wlan-ng package has its own method of configuring, but is dependent on wlan-ng drivers.

Is everyone just modifying their /etc/init.d/net.eth1 and adding iwconfig lines?  Or is there a cleaner way?

----------

## IntergalacticWalrus

I fully agree with AlterEgo, this "driverloader" thing is definitely not a good thing. Now Intel may reconsider about doing a native Linux driver, since there is already a solution available...

----------

## remi

 *Quote:*   

> Is everyone just modifying their /etc/init.d/net.eth1 and adding iwconfig lines? Or is there a cleaner way?

 

I just did this and it works fine. But it's not the correct place. Has anybody got a  better idea?

----------

## remi

BTW

I compiled and installed the driverloader wrapper with mm-sources-2.6.0.test9-mm1. No problems right now.

----------

## Strips

 *remi wrote:*   

> BTW
> 
> I compiled and installed the driverloader wrapper with mm-sources-2.6.0.test9-mm1. No problems right now.

 

what wlan card do you have? just curious if you have Dell truemobile 1400?

----------

## imesg

 *xunil wrote:*   

> Anyone know what the names of the files from the Windows driver I'll need to get this working? I have a Dell, and they repackage the drivers, I think, as the INF files I was able to find don't seem to be working. I'm assuming the real one I want is bundled up somewhere and was unpacked to somewhere in c:\windows (which I've got mounted).

 

On my sony vaio the filename is w70n51.inf, also need w70n51.sys. This is an intel pro/wireless 2100 or somesuch.

----------

## dudesinmexico

I got driverloader working, in fact I could connect to my neighbor's Lynsys wireless router   :Smile:   however Linuxant's web based installation totally screwed up my network setup. The wireless interface was set up on eth0, where I have the onboard ethernet. I had to delete the driver and even change some configuration files that the web setuo had written without any warnings! Does anyone know how to set up driverloader on eth1 ?

I think Linuxant should rethink the installation procedure.

-Arrigo

----------

## thundersteele

https://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/compatibility.php

Listed are all working devices, with links to locations where the correct windows driver can be downloaded.

my wlan card becomes eth1 as long as my lan card module gets loaded before.

----------

## dan2003

Well have it working kind of with 2.6.0-test9-gentoo

I have a lynksys ma521 rtl8180 based card which has native support (kind of) but i can't get it working. 

I have to boot with the card ejected, switch to console, rmmod driverloader, then modprobe driverloader, wait for it to finish messing about, then do ifconfig and route add bla, then switch to X, if i insert whilst in X or switch to X to soon the system locks hard. Locks hard occaisionally in use too. 

I would _MUCH_ prefer a native driver that was completly open source. the one i have is part closed and i'm not usre whether it is causing my problems or not  :Sad: .

oops. just noticed this thread was specific to intel centrino wlan, oh well...

/me slaps self

----------

## Rhysem

Unfortunatly a couple days ago linuxant announced pricing -- $19.95 for a "one or more years" support. The license is good forever, but you might need to pay them again for updated code is what it seems like.

I'm trying the linuxant drivers (1.38) with 2.6 and not having too much luck unfortunatly; I am getting kernel pancis (dell inspiron 300m). Tried turning off preempt-kernel , and that wasn't it.

----------

## dan2003

I'd personally will go buy another card (propperly supported one) rather than pay $20 to have a XP driver run on my machine. 

i know some of you guys have built in chipset so didn't have any choice but i should have read up on the subject more rather than just buying because it said linux support.

just my $0.05

:t

----------

## raker

http://sourceforge.net/projects/madwifi/

This driver works great and integrates with pcmcia-cs marvelously.

My card is detected when the pcmcia init script is run.  No fancy configuration required.

----------

## hspeijer

Okay it is way too late and I've been sinking my teeth into this for far too long. I'm a linux noob and I could really use some help.  

- I have an Asus WT-103B wireless card

- I got the pcmcia-cs installed without errors.

- kernel pcmcia setting is off

- kernel wireless setting is on

- no strange messages in dmesg except for a mtrr 0xe80000000, 0x2000000 overlaps existing [same] that might have been cause by earlier experiments

- cardctl info shows the card

- cardctl status says [ready]

- I know for sure the the card uses a chip that is supposed to be supported

- I tried both the asus W2K as WinXP drivers (seem to be the same anyway)

- I keep getting a failure to load the driverloader.o with modprobe coming from insmod.

I'm about to throw the card out of the window....

Thanks,

Hans

----------

## Rhysem

You might try a new driverloader, but i've been having problems with their code and the 2.6 kernel.

Alternatly you could try the new GPL implementation called ndiswrapper. It was on slashdot at: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/19/173230&mode=thread&tid=106&tid=137&tid=185&tid=193

----------

