Intel PRO/Wireless 2100, 2200BG, and 2915ABG Wi-Fi adapters
Mini-PCI 802.11b and 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi cards Intel built into Centrino-branded laptops in the early-to-mid 2000s. Intel discontinued the parts in 2009 and dropped vendor support after Windows Vista, but they still appear in surviving laptops from that era.
recommendation
Worth keeping but flagging as legacy hardware. The chips have been discontinued by Intel since 2009 and never moved to the modern iwlwifi driver, yet upstream contributors are still posting real fixes and API updates as recently as late 2025 and early 2026, so the code is not bit-rotting. Anyone with a Centrino-era ThinkPad or similar laptop running current Linux still depends on this, and there is no successor driver that covers the same silicon.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
Recent upstream attention exists in 2026: a targeted fix for an ipw2200 PCI device ID conflict was posted to linux-wireless.
- lore.kernel.org
The driver family still receives maintenance patches in 2025, here a workqueue API update for ipw2x00.
- intel.com
Intel classifies PRO/Wireless 2200BG and 2915ABG as legacy/discontinued products and shows support only for 32-bit Windows XP/Vista, with no Windows 7+ support.
- intel.com
Intel's regulatory archive shows the PRO/Wireless 2200BG documentation dating back to December 2003, consistent with very old hardware generations.
- community.intel.com
An Intel-hosted community reply states the PRO/Wireless 2200BG was discontinued in 2009 and had reached end of interactive support.
- kernel.org
Kernel documentation identifies ipw2100 as the driver for Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 hardware.
- kernel.org
Kernel documentation identifies ipw2200 as the unified driver for Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG and 2915ABG hardware.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Recommendation is keep-annotate: hardware is clearly obsolete and not a 2025 new-deployment part, but lore still shows real upstream maintenance rather than removal. Recent lore evidence came from lore_activity on ipw2200.c and included 2025-11 and 2026-02 linux-wireless patches; lore_file_timeline also showed touches through 2026-03, though many were stable rollups. Intel support pages were obtained via web search/open/find and show these adapters are legacy/discontinued and limited to XP/Vista-era support. The kernel.org doc URLs are canonical recall used to name the supported chipset set. No natural upstream replacement driver covers the same chips; newer Intel WLAN parts use iwlwifi, but not these devices. Expected deployments today are low: legacy laptops, hobbyist/retro systems, and occasional long-lived embedded/industrial installs.