Compaq nc8000 With Intel 2200bg wireless.

Somewhere in the past, installed Kubuntu. I thought it worked out of the box, but I may have installed a driver or something**. It worked perfectly until another issue caused me to re-install.

Present: Have tried to get it working with Kubuntu, Mepis, PCLinuxOS, and SUSE 10.2--all failed, but with different kind of error messages. On Mepis, tried a complere re-install of ieee80211 and the intel driver/firmware. On SUSE, just the firmware.

On a hunch, I tried Ubuntu 6.10---the wireless works out of the box with NO PROBLEMS!!

I don't know how much I will invest in researching this, but I am very curious why Ubuntu can do this and others cannot. By my reading, the Intel 2200 is quite common.


** I suppose I need to start a journal--at my age, the past gets increasingly blurred...

On my laptop (running Gentoo) it worked as "out-of-the-box" as anything Gentoo can get, just had to compile the driver module and download and install the firmware, after that it's worked like a charm. Maybe Ubuntu ships with and can automatically set up the firmware?

Works ok with a recent kernel.
No need to play around with ieee80211 removal and recompiling. A lot of people are doing it wrongly. The documentation is not really user-oriented..
I think I got it to work after a few minutes in Suse10.2
And on Debian I have had no problems recompiling or using stock kernel.
It's probably not the ipw2200 driver that doesn't work because it's now in the mainline kernel so it's very stable (suse kernels are more tweaked than debian but still..).
The distribution include user(!=kernel) programs which can fail (udev, firmware, radio switch..)

I'm happy with this card. No need to install anything.

Using SUSE 10.2, the firmware was not there on the initial install. After installing the firmware, the wireless still did not work--and I could not find an error message or other clue.

Not that Ubuntu is working, I'm going to work backwards to look for differences.....

I view all this as an adventure---a normal person would likely see it as a pain...

Some play quake3D, some recompile kernels

About the firmware, yes they are usually not there for xxxx reasons..
Then these files have to be loaded on each reboot. I think it's done after udev starts.
And after this when you modprobe ipw2200 you should have logs in /var/log/messages otherwise that's really strange