Wireless drivers and Knoppix

[JDizzle]

I have a Compaq Presario V2000 notebook and I'm trying to install a mini pci wireless card. The only problem is that HP, Compaq, and IBM have bios that lock out the use of non approved wireless cards. The point of this is so these companys can sell wireless cards for twice as much as you can get them for. However there is a method out there using Linux to get passed this dirty trick. Unfortunately it's for the Intel 2200 wireless card and I have the Atheros 5006XS card.

I don't know enough about Linux to compile the drivers myself so could someone please walk me through this. The guide I found says this

Click on the penguin on the taskbar and select "Root Shell", then the following command (from now on any line that begins with a # is a command to be typed at the Root prompt:
#iwconfig
You will get a list of ethernet adapters, eth0, eth1 etc. The wireless one should be quite obvious from the text displayed after it with all the wireless parameters!
#ethtool -e ethX
Obviously replace the 'X' with the index of your wireless card you found above.
You will get a hex dump of the 256 bytes of EEPROM data.
Note: There is nothing dangerous in the above steps at all.

If you want to writing to your EEPROM (You can seriously screw your card up so be careful ):

#mkdir /usr/tmp
#cd /usr/tmp
#wget http://www.geocities.com/sonyirclib/ipw2200.tar.gz

N.B. This file has already been patched to allow writing to the eeprom

#tar xvzf ipw2200.tar.gz
#cd ipw2200-1.0.3
#sh unload
#sh load

Now all that you need to do is write to the eeprom. If your card is from Europe:

#ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0x8 value 0xf6
#ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0x9 value 0x12
#ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0xa value 0x3c
#ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0xb value 0x10

If it is from the US:

ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0x8 value 0xf5
ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0x9 value 0x12
ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0xa value 0x3c
ethtool -E eth0 magic 0x2200 offset 0xb value 0x10

N.B. the -E must be uppercase for writing to work.

Now reboot your computer and you should no longer get the error 104...!

But when I put in the command line "#iwconfig " it says no wireless extensions...

I also tried following this article http://www.dagarlas.org/stuff/computing/article0001.php but there are a few parts that are different than what I'm getting.

The first step says..

The first step is to get Broadcom 4318 IDs, and an lspci -nv can do the work; here is the output

I however do not have a brodcom or any other card inside of my laptop right now so I can't get an id at all. I figured that part wasn't too important though so I continued on. In the third step it says...

root@electron:~# ethtool -e ath0
Cannot get EEPROM data: Operation not supported

When I enter that command I get the reply..

Cannot get driver information: No such device.

After this I get totally lost and cannot do very much because I'm a complete newbie to Linux. I'm currently using a Knoppix disk to do this and I've never actually used Linux before so if you could please help me I'd appreciate it very much. Thank you very much..

 

[gruven]

You will need the madwifi drivers (Madwifi works for Atheros Chipsets) for Linux to recognize your card, and you will also need the wireless-tools package.

You should be able to use your distributions package manager to get those.

 

[JDizzle]

I don't actually want to use Linux with my wireless card, I just want to use it to do whatever the guide says because it gets pass the bios lock out. Will madwifi help me with that?

 

[gruven]

I don't actually want to use Linux with my wireless card, I just want to use it to do whatever the guide says because it gets pass the bios lock out. Will madwifi help me with that?

Ahhh, sorry, I misunderstood your intentions.

I am thinking the answer might be yes, but I am not sure. For Linux to even recognize your card and assign it, you will need the madwifi drivers. Then you will have an ath0 device, and you can use that in place of the ethX device in the guide.

I have never dealt with a bios like that, but I hope that helps. Good luck.