The Intersil Corporation Prism 2.5 Wavelan chipset can be found in first-generation IBM ThinkPad R40 notebooks. It won't work with Dapper/Edgy out-of-the-box, because the kernel loads the wrong module---it is best supported by hostap, not orinoco. This can be fixed by adding these lines to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist:

blacklist orinoco_pci
blacklist orinoco
blacklist prism2_pci
blacklist hermes

This should then give you an wifi0 and eth1 interface which works great with WPA supplicant---see WifiDocs/WPAHowTo.

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This solution also helped me make the wireless LAN on my IBM ThinkPad A31p run under Feisty. But only after updating the line in /etc/iftab saying wlan0 mac 00:00:0... with the correct MAC-address the NetworkManager worked automatically.

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CategoryHardware