adding a new wireless lan card to my laptop..

I’m proud owner of a HP nx 7000 (of which _every_ part works with linux). The main problem with this laptop is its BIOS which employs a pciID-whitelist to prevent home-made miniPCI-card upgrades. This wouldn’t be that annoying if the latest BIOS revision wouldn’t be 2 years old and HP wouldn’t have stopped delivering 802.11(a)bg wireless cards for this model.

So I bought a Intel Pro/Wireless 2915ABG six month ago, placed it in a miniPCI slot and was stunned by the “104 – don’t want to boot, FSOD” messages which my notebook produced. A short glace at the internet told me that there was no ‘simple’ solution (as patching my BIOS’ whitelist as can be done for some IBM laptops). I sold the card.

Earlier last month I found out that using an even older BIOS revision would solve my whitelist problem (kudos for HP for not even mentioning that change in the BIOS’ ChangeLog). So now I’m back to a BIOS revision F.34, a working Intel Pro/Wireless 2915ABG (but without monitor support under linux) and a somewhat more unstable laptop than before. Flashing the wlan’s EEPROM would be an option, but I fear that I would have to reprogramm all card specific (vendorid, productid, subvendorid, subproductid) IDs and hack the linux ipw2200 driver to still recogize my card. This would be simple.. but enabling windows on my laptop to use this wlan card gives me the shivers.. stay tuned.

If anyone does know a simpler solution.. pray stand up.

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