Quote:Wireless Ethernet: 

The Compaq Wireless LAN MultiPort W200 is an excellent addition to this laptop; no pc card sticking out of the side, and it's easily upgradable unlike other built-in wireless cards (I just wish they'd made it a bit slimmer). I actually flashed mine with the Actiontec firmware when trying to get it working with a previous version of the linux-wlan drivers (as I found suggested on a mailing list). It's working fine now, but I don't know whether or not it'd work with the Compaq firmware. Please note that, as far as I know, there is NO WAY to revert to the Compaq firmware if you do this. Therefore, I would suggest that you do this only as an absolute last resort, and at your own risk. You could permanently destroy your wireless card. (If anyone knows how to get the Compaq firmware back on the card, please let me know.)

 

You can get the latest drivers from the linux-wlan site. You need to enable USB support when you configure them.

 

The default hotplug drivers and config script were having issues (it seems that the normal hotplug program tries to pull information from /proc/bus/usb which makes the card unhappy), so I ended up writing my own hotplug script, available here. Put this somewhere like /usr/local/sbin, then put this startup script wherever your distribution will run it (I have mine in /etc/rc.boot for Debian).

 

Power to the Multiport card is controlled with Function-F2 on the N600c. Make sure that it's enabled in your BIOS setup. I have issues roaming from one ssid to another; if I do so, I always have to turn the card off and back on to reassociate (which is pretty simple with Fn-F2). Also, tcpdumping causes large amounts of latency/packet loss, even in non-promiscuous mode. I also have found that the card doesn't associate well unless you specify "ssid=" (e.g., no ssid). The two wireless networks I usually use both have broadcast ssid turned on, so I don't know how well the card will work on a network where you have to specify the ssid. If you're having trouble getting your card to associate at all, look at the wlanctl-ng commands in my lighthotplug script, even if you aren't using it. I'm manually modprobing prism2_usb (which installs p80211 beneath it) at bootup via /etc/modules; I don't trust the kernel autoloader. If you're having trouble seeing the card at all, make sure that these two modules are getting loaded.