dkpw – Wicked Fire

The main two issues laptop users face with any form of Linux and Slackware in particular, is to make sure you make the most of your graphics and wireless network cards.

My T43p has the following wireless and graphics cards, which you can find typing the command lspci on the command line.

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M24GL [Mobility FireGL V3200] (rev 80)
0b:02.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Network Connection (rev 05)

Graphics Card:
I chose to install the proprietary ATI drivers, which simply meant a quick trip to http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html to download the latest installer and ran it at the command prompt. A quick check of the resultant /etc/X11/xorg.conf and a startx gave me a lovely 1440×1050 KDE desktop.

Wireless Card:
The intel 2915ABG can use ipw2200 drivers, which are built into the stock Slackware 12 SMP kernel, so there is no need to use Ndiswrapper or other options for non-supported cards. Aren’t you glad you bought a ThinkPad! Use the uname -a command to determine exactly which kernel you have:

Linux SlackT43p 2.6.21.5-smp #2 SMP Tue Jun 19 14:58:11 CDT 2007 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 2.13GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Having established you are using a compatible kernel, you need to install the correct firmware for the card. This is obtainable from http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php. Select Firmware V3.0, download it and place the extracted files in /lib/firmware. Then reboot.

During reboot you should now see several lines beginning with ipw2200 which instead of reporting firmware load failures should now be showing you, a successfully live card:

ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.2.0kmprq
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Network Connection
ipw2200: Detected geography ZZE (13 802.11bg channels, 19 802.11a channels)

You can confirm these if you miss them during reboot, by checking the output of dmesg.

Next at the command prompt, you can check the drivers are working:

modprobe ipw2200
ifconfig -a
iwlist eth1 scan

These ensure the kernel module is loaded, check you have wired and wireless interfaces, and finally tell the wireless card to scan for active access points.

eth1 Scan completed :
Cell 01 – Address: 00:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
ESSID:”xxxxxxxx”
Protocol:IEEE 802.11bg
Mode:Master
Channel:4
Encryption key:on
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s
11 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 22 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s
36 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
Quality=99/100 Signal level=-23 dBm
IE: WPA Version 1
Group Cipher : TKIP
Pairwise Ciphers (1) : TKIP
Authentication Suites (1) : PSK
Extra: Last beacon: 420ms ago

Found one!

You can now edit /etc/rc.d/rc.modules and add these lines to start the card at boot.

# wireless networking with led
/sbin/modprobe ipw2200 led=1

You are using WPA on your access points aren’t you? So let’s configure it.

Slackware 12.0 comes with a WPA-Supplicant package by default.

First in /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf edit these lines for your network.

*)
INFO=”My Network”
ESSID=”MyESSID”
;;

Then add the following lines in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf for the wireless interface, in this case eth1.

WLAN_WPA[1]=”wpa_supplicant”
WLAN_WPADRIVER[1]=”wext”

Finally edit /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf so as to enter your SSID and key. If, as is likely, you have an access point which uses a phrase rather than a key, this command will provide you with the details you need to add to the wpa configuration file.

wpa_passphrase YOURSSID yourpassphrase

Cut and paste the output into the network section of the wpa_supplicant.conf file.

Now let’s see if we can connect.

ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig eth1 up
iwconfig eth1 essid dkpw
wpa_supplicant -ieth1 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf &
dhcpcd eth1

That should be you…

Tags: Linux, Slackware, ThinkPad

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