HP iPAQ 210 / 214 - WiFi

Status

The WiFi seems to work reasonably well. There have been reports of a few problems and a lot of problems if not enough memory is avaliable.

Firmware

To get it to work you need to download the firmware from Marvell's site:

http://www.marvell.com/drivers/driverDisplay.do?driverId=203 (I don't think I am allowed to include it in the distribution)

Unzip that file and then untar the file 'SD-8686-FEDORA26FC6-SYSKT-GPL-9.70.3.p24-26409.P45.tar' In that is a directory called 'FwImage' with two files in it.

Copy sd8686.bin directly to /lib/firmware on the Angstrom partition. Copy helper_sd.bin to /lib/firmware but rename it to sd8686_helper.bin

Control driver

I've written a short driver for controlling the power (on/off) which you have to use by writing things to it's sysfs entries.

To turn it on, run on the root shell:

echo on > /sys/devices/platform/hpipaq214-wifi/wifistate

and to turn it off:

echo off > /sys/devices/platform/hpipaq214-wifi/wifistate

Crashes

Sometimes when I first turn it on it gives a "kmmcd: page allocation failure" and stack trace. Turning off and on again seems to get around this. Check your dmesg output.

Configuring

At the moment there is no UI so you have to configure it with the command line tools. The process typically goes like this:

echo on > /sys/devices/platform/hpipaq214-wifi/wifistate
iwconfig eth0 essid <put your provider essid here>
wpa_supplicant -ieth0 -Dwext -c<path/to/wpa_supplicant.conf> -Bw
ifconfig eth0 up
udhcpc -ieth0

And the wpa_supplicant.conf (if you're using WPA, which you probably should be) looks a bit like this:

        ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=users

        network={
               ssid="<put your provider essid here>"
               scan_ssid=1
               key_mgmt=WPA-PSK # <-- you may need to change that
               psk="<put your WPA pass-key here>"
          }