Intel 2200bg problem Ubuntu 9.10

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This is more a heads-up re. problems with Ubuntu 9.x and the Intel 2200bg wireless hardware.

I have battled on & off for weeks trying to get the Ubuntu 9.10 & 2200bg combination to work. Problems have been reported widely since 9.x. It worked out of the box with 8.x as far as I can remember. I moved to wicd (std. Ubuntu repository version 1.6.2) & later to 1.7. I preferred wicd so stuck with it.

I have seen countless reports of these problems with a variety of "this works for me" solutions. Using "hwcrypto=0" in /etc/modprobe.d/ipw2200 seemed to improve matters but wicd reporting "bad password" was very common. This setting seemed to get over the authentication problem (but not always). Then the problem seemed to be a dhcp issue where wicd or the ipw2200 driver seemed to instantly toss away the offered IP address - as reported by wicd.log.

Just to add to the many tales associated with this wireless card, the "this works for me" solution was to force a fixed IP at the router end (ie MAC address based). How this can possibly be the solution is beyond me. And I only did it to be tidy.

I tried Puppy Linux 4.3.1 and Mepis 8.0 Live CDs and neither connected wirelessly out of the box either.