Project: Camphor

As promised, BETA version of the driver is available for download now.

IMPORTANT: All versions of this driver include the latest version of the PRO/Wireless™ 2200BG firmware supplied by Intel®. This is covered by a special license. PLEASE READ THE LICENSE IN FULL AND MAKE SURE YOU AGREE WITH IT BEFORE YOU DOWNLOAD OR USE THIS DRIVER. Click here to read the license. In accordance with Intel’s instructions, a copy of the license is included within the .kext, as a plain-text file.

Download v-05 Here

Older versions: v04 / v03 / v02 / v01

Notes:

1. Full suspend/resume support: card turns off and back on during suspend/resume. If you were connected to a network while suspending your laptop, on resume it should be reconnected automatically (this is done by Airport UI so if it doesn’t happen on your system, don’t blame the driver ;-)

2. Added sysctl key debug.wirelessmode to force a particular connection mode: use 0 for auto (default, recommended), 1 to force .11b mode, and 2 to force .11g mode. In case you have unstable connection or the card turns off because of firmware error, you might need to force 11b mode. Otherwise in auto-mode, the card will use 11g if the access point supports it.

3. Signal strength and other info is passed on to the operating system properly now so you should be able to see the arcs on the Airport icon respond to real signal strength. Option-clicking the icon shows detailed info.

4. Supports 64 and 128bit WEP in hardware, however, 64bit WEP doesn’t seem to work - the Airport UI sends the driver a hashed 128bit key if anything other than 13 ascii characters are entered in the WEP password dialog box. Adding $ or 0x to the key doesn’t help. Hopefully we can find a workaround.

5. Support for 11g mode with full performance for 54 mbps. Sensitivity and silence thresholds are set according to the network characteristics so connection should be stable even in weak signal.

License related notes:

1. This was intended as internal test version, so there is no support for it at the moment.

2. I am not liable for any damages in any way related to your use or inability to use this driver.

3. This driver is being made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license. You can distribute it freely as long as it’s attributed to the author (Prashant Vaibhav) and you’re not selling it for money.

The 2200 BG card has some peculiar problems, for which I’ve not added much workarounds (yet) mainly because of the pending rewrite. The known issues are:

1. The firmware throws an error sometimes. In this case the card will turn itself off (you can see that in the Airport icon). Just turn it on again and usually things should be back to normal. The workaround for it is to have a watchdog timer which can do this automatically, this will be added in the rewrite.

2. The card sometimes simply refuses to turn on at all (the firmware upload times out). This is pretty rare but it seems to happen because of high temperature. You have to turn your laptop off (not reboot) and turn it on again, which usually fixes the problem. There is no workaround for it as this happens with all OS’s.

3. Passive scanning for networks while being associated to a network doesn’t work well. This was low-priority so I’ll fix this later. If you need to switch networks, turn the card off and back on, then let it scan for available networks.

4. Connecting to a network while scanning is in progress is sometimes problematic, just wait 2 seconds for the scan to be over and the network list to be updated.

5. When using WEP, the firmware is quite unstable and sometimes the card will turn off mid-connection, during heavy activity. You will need to turn the card back on (Airport will automatically reconnect to the network and your transfer should resume). This is a problem with the firmware, not the driver! It will be fixed later when software crypto support is added.

Please do not post any bug reports, I am very well aware of all the problems (I have the exact same hardware!). I will tackle all bugs only after the rewrite is done

Enjoy!