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After having some fun with madwifi-ng and hostap already, I decided to put the Atheros MiniPCI card I bought some months ago in my laptop to be able to use the cool madwifi-ng drivers there as well.

Unfortunately after putting it in and booting you get that:

1802: Unauthorized network card is plugged in -
Power off and remove the miniPCI network card.

Some investigation brought up that this is caused he card's PCI-ID being checked against a whitelist in the BIOS. I liked IBM ThinkPads, and especially my X41, quite much so far, but this check hardly seems to have a technical background. It just forces people to buy IBM authorized cards..

Anyway, I wanted to use an Atheros card. So what were the possibilities?

Buying a PCMCIA card with Atheros chip? No.. I already had an Atheros card around and wanted to use the integrated wifi. Some people reported that the check could be switched of by flipping a CMOS bit. That doesn't seem to work with my X41. I could still have flashed the BIOS with a version with a changed whitelist, but I didn't want to fuck up a 1,600 EUR laptop. Therefor I decided to change the PCI-ID of my card. Only 40 EUR would have been lost if I did it wrong.

I found a nice article that explains how to do that very well. Basically you need to

remove the MiniPCI wifi card

switch the laptop on

put the card in while the laptop is running (after the BIOS checks and before the Linux kernel boots)

install madwifi

use a special tool to change the PCI-ID to the ID of an authorized card

hack the driver to recognize the card with the new PCI-ID

go outside, enjoy the nice weather and hack

Life can be so easy.