R40 MiniPCI compatibility - any A/B/G or B/G cards supported

[mmmkay]

I checked out the latest R40 bios update summary of changes and it looks like one of the IBM Thinkpad b/g cards is now supported. I guess my question is whether anyone knows if any of the a/b/g cards from IBM work with the R40.

I'll be sending off an email to IBM to ask if they carry anything but it'll likely be super expensive (1/2 the price of my laptop). And I just wondered if anyone had any experience with other cards that "just work".

The Intel 2200BG card I was using with the no-1802 hack was fine, but I have a feeling that it was causing some of the weird issues I was having with the laptop crashing on resume and starting up in the morning. I'm doubting that it would be a driver issue since I had the latest drivers for it. But you never know.

I'm going to run a few more test for a couple days with the old Cisco Aironet card and see if the crashes go away.

[Terrahawk]

Check out these threads:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=31379
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... ght=no1802

I have an IBM Thinkpad 11a/b/g Mini-PCI Adapter II in my R40.

[mmmkay]

I bought the 73P4301 ThinkPad 11a/b/g Wireless LAN Mini-PCI Adapter II card and have since installed it. The sales folks told me it was compatible with my R40 but I got the 1802 error.

Does the wireless light and Fn+F5 work even though you had to do the 1802 hack.

[Terrahawk]

Yes, both of those features work, much to my relief.

[mmmkay]

Actually it looks like one of the IBM parts does in fact use an Intel 2200BG.

I'm going to try to hack the eeprom to try to get the IBM drivers to recognize it as an IBM card, thus letting me use the Fn+F5 and wireless light

If this works, this might be a feasible solution to getting your wireless cards to use the wireless light and Fn+F5, along with the 1802 hack.

[Terrahawk]

I previously had a generic Atheros chipset card, and I tried to get the LED and Fn+F5 functionality to work properly. The LED is more than just a driver thing - the hardware has to support it too. There is a block of four GPIO pins on the Mini-PCI card and one of them will be wired to the radio enable/disable line. If it does not correspond to IBM's wiring, interesting things can happen. I hacked the generic Atheros drivers to enable the LED but that caused my R40 to instantly lock up.

I downloaded the Mini-PCI spec and found that the wireless on/off pin that was being driven by the generic Atheros driver was different to the one reserved in the spec to turn off wireless cards. Having no circuit diagrams or anything like that, it was somewhat confusing and my conclusions are rather vague at best, but I found that yeah, you need a combination of the right hardware and a proper driver to make the LED and Fn+F5 functionality work.

Hence, I decided to just front up for a genuine IBM card (which *still* required the no-1802 hack) but it appears that they will swap it for an IBM 11a/b/g Mini PCI I card, which I hear does work properly. I don't think I'll bother though.

[mmmkay]

Yep. Sorta came to the same conclusion a few hours ago before heading to bed too

With the Intel 2200BG card, you can use ethtool in linux to modify some parts of the eeprom to change the subvendor id so that the card is detected as a geniune IBM part. But as far as I could see they weren't able to get the LED to function, again probably a subtle difference between the two cards. I might end up doing it anyway just so I don't need to rely on the 1802 hack in case the CMOS battery dies or I update the firmware.

But I guess unless I find a cheap IBM part that supports 802.11g I'll be using my $20 2200BG card for now.. though I really liked the Fn+F5 and LED!