Using Centrino miniPCI in non-Centrino devices

Mostly out of curiosity, I recently bought one of the cheap Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG cards. I tried to install it in my (obviously non-centrino) AMD Turion64 notebook, and it almost worked immediately with the ipw2200 driver.

The only issue remaining is the hardware RF_KILL pin. It's intended for those hardware-switches that allow the user to physically disable any RF input/output [for airplanes, hospitals and the like]. Intel is using Pin 13 of the miniPCI slot for that, and even though the TARGA notebook (manufactured by MSI) has such a switch, it seems to be using a different pin. So what I did is cut a tiny strip of adhesive tape and glue it on pin13. This prevents any electrical contact and makes the 2915ABG card happy.

Now I have working wireless in that notebook. However, at the expense of Bluetooth, since the original INPROCOMM 2220 card implemented both, 802.11 and Bluetooth.

Just as a reference, I also tried a Winstron CM9 Atheros 5212 a/b/g card, and though it electrically worked, I was unable to receive anything with the latest madwifi-cvs. Played some time with the debugging options - at no avail.

Now the TODO contains checking out Jeff Garzik's latest wireless-2.6 tree and see how Intel and SuSE are doing with the new generalized 802.11 layer.