I just tried to put an Atheros AR5005G Wireless Network Adapter into my compaq presario R3000 only to have it come up with an "unrecognized Wireless adapter detected, please move the dvice and restart". I found in another forum that the list of compatible wireless cards for that particular laptop is encoded in the bios and cannot be changed or updated.

So my real question is, how can I tell/find out if a laptop is compatible or not compatible with an atheros card?

-Mikey

A quick visit to: http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/compaq.html
shows that the Broadcom Corporation BCM94306 802.11g (rev 03) is a good choice.

http://cmb.phys.cwru.edu/kisner/linux/compaq-r3000/

Don't know if this will help but I have a Atheros AR 5006EG in a Sony VGN-N220E and it is working in Fedora 7.

Welcome to LQ!

It may be possible to use that Atheros, see this thread:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=20365

Good luck!

Thanx for your help. I'm new to linux so I'm doing a lot of research and a friend told me to get an atheros card for my laptop because the currently broadcom I have won't work under linux. Well, it can, I can install the driver successfully and all of that except theres no way to turn the card "on". I have a button to turn it on and it doesn't work and from what I've found they don't know a command to turn it on, so atm it's useless.

I got that atheros card from a friend and found that my laptop wouldn't take it. So I didn't know that there was such thing as a whitelist on a chip telling the laptop which cards it would support, I figured any mini pci card would work with any laptop. So I was mainly wondering how you can tell or find out if your laptop will take the card or is it just a channce thing?

I'm going to look more into that fix, I think it only works on that model laptop though and not a Compaq Presario R3000.

Thanx for the help so far guys and any additional help would be great!!

-Mikey

I just found this link by accident. I think it's my answer, but costs some $, not sure how much though, but if it's cheap I'm doin it. http://www.hydra-networks.com/biospr.../index-en.html

-Mikey

if all you need is a BIOS update then first check at the HP/Compaq support site, they should have the latest updated BIOS and updater available for free.

This is not about BIOS update. These BIOS-es have built-in list of blessed wireless devices they work with. This does not make sense of course but so it is - only those "whitelisted" cards work, with some other card installed computer refuses to boot. There are several workarounds depending on brand.
1. To hack BIOS and turn the whitelist check off,
2. To hack BIOS and add your card to whitelist (link in post #6),
3. To hack the EEPROM of the wireless card to disguise it (link in post #4).

Yea I think I'm going with the link in post #6, because if something goes wrong I have the links to reflash the bios back to original. I'll try it out soon and if it works, I'll post here so others with know.

-Mikey