Cisco Aironet Wireless 802.11b
Cisco Aironet Wireless 802.11bThis is a Mini-PCI WiFi Adapter that is installed in a Mini-PCI slot. Features
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IBM Partnumbers
IBM Order PN (WW): 31P8301
IBM Order PN (Japan): 31P8302
IBM Order PN (EMEA): 31P8303
IBM Order PN (China): 31P8304
IBM FRU PN (WW): 26P8319, 26P8435, 26P8496
IBM FRU PN (Japan): 26P8323, 26P8369, 26P8500
IBM FRU PN (EMEA): 26P8321, 26P8367, 26P8498
IBM FRU PN (China): 26P8325, 26P8371, 26P8502
Other IBM FRU PN: 91P7406,91P7408,91P7410,26P7412
Also known (in IBM literature) as....
- Cisco Aironet Wireless 802.11b Mini PCI
- 802.11b Cisco Wireless Card (Sherman III)
Linux WiFi driver
A opensource Linux 'airo' driver is available, and included in recent 2.6 kernels.
There is a sourceforge project page for this driver, but it seems unmaintained.
One of the developers has his own project page here, but there have not been any updates since September 2004.
In addition there is a slightly dated driver available from Cisco after jumping through a bunch of hoops, such as providing Cisco with your personal information.
The current Cisco driver version is 2.1 and only supports select Linux 2.4 kernels.
Known problems
Linux 2.4 Older airo or mpi350 drivers might not work with certain (more recent) Cisco firmware. Evidently there is a Windows tool where you can modify the firmware, but if you've already nuked your win32 partition like I have, you'll be in a pickle. For Linux 2.4, you want older firmware version 5b00.08 5.00.03, which is available with version 3.4.9 of the Cisco Windows drivers.
There also have been reports that the Window driver auto-magically updates the firmware, so if you dual boot between operating systems one day your Wireless under the Linux kernel may stop working. I haven't had that happen to me, but be careful about Windows Update or Microsoft Update. Never update the Cisco software in Windows—it also updates the firmware silently.
Linux 2.6 For Linux 2.6, this is not a problem. Cisco updated it's mpi350 driver and the fixes have been reverse-engineered and incorporated in the open-source airo driver for Linux 2.6. I am running Cisco firmware version 5.20.17 with Linux 2.6.11 (supplied with SuSE 9.3) and airo driver 0.6. The firmware was upgraded under WinXP automatically with the Cisco driver update. The older firmware also works with the Linux 2.6 driver
Get firmware information from /proc/driver/aironet/eth?/Status (eth0 or eth1) (airo driver) or /proc/driver/mpi350/Status (mpi350 driver).
ThinkPads this card may be found in
External Sources
- Specifications: MIGR-44122
- Users Guide: MIGR-44107
- Service Parts: MIGR-44128
- IBMs page on Wireless configuration under Linux
