This is now sorted. I ended up finding out how to use the ipw2200 drivers from the sourceforge site.
I wrote a howto, and submited it to the tutorials area. It doesn't seem to have appeared there, so I guess it's a moderated thing??
Anyway, I'll post it in this reply...
Setting up Wireless LAN on Sony VAIO VGN-A217M On Debian Unstable
Preamble
OK, I bought this fantastic laptop and got just about all the features working on it in Linux bar one – the wireless card. It's a Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG card, and there seems to be a lot of people out there with similar issues to what I had. This document will server to remind me how to do it again if needed, and, hopefully, to help others. Anyway, on with the show...
Prerequisites
I use Debian as my distro of choice, so things may be slightly different for your machine. I am also running 'unstable' and my apt sources list looks like this;
...
deb
ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb-src
ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
...
Packages required are;
wireless-tools
ipw2200
firmware
You will need to make sure you have the correct 'make' tools and gcc compilers installed.
Also, you will need a 2.6(.4+ I think) kernel, compiled from source with HAM_RADIO compiled as module and HOTPLUG support enabled. Once installed, you will need to make a link from your /lib/modules/[Kernel.Vers] directory, called 'build' and aimed at your kernel source files. In my case this was created like so;
ln -s /usr/src/kernel-source-2.6.8 /lib/modules/2.6.8/build
Install Packages
This is specific install to Debian, but there are RPM's out there and source packages as well, but next we need to install wireless-tools;
apt-get update
apt-get install wireless-tools
Next, download the ipw2200-0.16.tgz package from sourceforge, and save it somewhere safe in your home directory – I saved mine to ~[username]/software/. To install it;
cd /usr/local/src
tar xzvf ~[username]/software/ipw2200.tgz
cd ipw2200-0.16
make
make install
I didn't encounter any problems here. If you do, check that you have the correct apps installed to comile with and that you have the kernel source built correctly etc. Don't forget the symlink in /lib/modules/[kernel.vers]
Download the firmware from sourceforge. Make sure you get the correct one, for the ipw2200-0.16 used here the ipw2200-fw-2.0.tgz is the correct one. This will contain 4 firmware files which need copying to;
/usr/lib/hotplug/firmware
Get things going
If you've tried getting things going previously with an 'ndis' package, remove it, remove the installed module (modprobe -r ndiswrapper) and reboot.
Load the ipw2200 module;
modprobe ipw2200
Check this is loaded without errors by looking at you dmesg output;
dmesg | grep ipw2200
Make sure there are no errors, then adjust your interfaces file to look something like this (I used vi...);
vi /etc/network/interfaces
...
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).
# The primary network interface
#auto eth0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp
#name Ethernet LAN card
iface eth0 inet dhcp
wireless_essid *********
wireless_key **********
wireless_mode Managed
wireless_ap any
wireless_channel 11
auto eth0
...
Obviously the particular settings only you will know. 'iwlist' is your friend here;
iwlist [interface] scan
Notice how the origonal eth0 setting for your origonal wired connection are just blanked out. This will make things easy to uncomment/comment things if you are working away from a wireless LAN and don't want too much hassle re-inputting details.
Now restart the network and cross fingers;
/etc/init.d/networking restart
Notes
The ipw2200-0.16 drivers and firmware can be downloaded from
http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/
There is plenty of extra help on their pages too.
Steve
ff
