I have a laptop with a "Intel Corp. PRO/Wireless 2200BG (rev 05)" wireless controller, and while I think I am close to getting it working, I'm not there yet.

I have an AMD64 (K8) based CPU and I'm running Gentoo linux (2.6.9-gentoo-r6).

As I understand things, this chipset is not supported by the standard linux kernel, but I found a page which claims they support the chip.

I have been to http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/ and I downloaded their ipw2200-0.16.tgz and ipw2200-fw-2.0.tgz files.

I installed the firmware files into /lib/firmware/ because that is the path which was specified in my /etc/hotplug/firmware.agent file:

After the firmware was placed in a reasonable location, I compiled the kernel module and instaled in the appropriate place.

Next, I set up my kernel as per the INSTALL files directions:

The problem is that when I try to insert the module I get the following errors:

The "ipw2200: dmaWaitSync Failed" is what is quite confusing. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!

you need ndiswrapper or linuxant to make that work. Linuxant works a dream on my Acer.

I went to both of those websites (ndiswrapper and linuxant) and I neither seem to support AMD64. Even if they do, why would I want to use emulated windows drivers when there is a linux project that supports the hardware natively? (http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/)

Does anyone else have any ideas?

confused me....isn't the AMD64 supposed to be backwards compatible with most everything? I'd just stick a 386 version on and see what happens.

Well, sorry, my post may have been a little rude. I'll try a little harder on this emulation thing. The problem is that I use a 64-bit kernel and I will not change to a 32-bit kernel. That being said, AMD64 can run 32-bit software just fine, but you cannot use 32-bit kernel modules with a 64-bit kernel. That's why the AMD64 support for these driver emulation projects is a big deal. Further, I susspect that trying to get 32-bit windows drivers to work with a 64-bit kernel through emulation is not an easy task.

I use gentoo, and I tried to emerge all the ndiswrapper packages available despite the fact that they were all masked. They all failed to compile/configure correctly. I'll move on to linuxant next, but I would really like to have my hardware supported natively by Linux, and http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/ claims to support it. Does anyone have experience with the ipw2200 driver?

No worries fella.

I think you must be on the ragged edge of Linux and good luck to you for it.

Thx for the 32 bit/64bit kernel info.

Still, at least this thread is bumping :-)

The ipw2200 module works perfectly but with gentoo its best not to install the modules from the packages but you can emerge them. I've tried to get them working from the packages bet it didn't work.

to emerge the ipw2200 driver you do

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge net-wireless/ipw2200

you can load the module like this
(you don't neet the ifname=wlan0 option but it is easyer to configure later)
modprobe ipw2200 ifname=wlan0

To connect to any unencrypted network do

iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
iwconfig wlan0 essid any
dhcpcd wlan0 &

To connect to an encrypted network

iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
# you need to use your key and possably change open to another encryption method
iwconfig wlan0 key open 12345678abcdabcd12345678ab
# you have to change YOURID with the correct essid
# if you don't know it scan for it using "iwlist wlan0 scanning"
iwconfig wlan0 essid YOURID
dhcpcd wlan0 &

Also check that you have "net-wireless/wireless-tools" installed

make sure you give execution rights to the firmware files. it was needed for my 2100.