Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 AGN

When sending over the Intel Ivy Bridge kit back in April, Intel also included an engineering sample of a PCI Express x1 WiFi adapter that is part of their "Desktop Intel WiFi - 2012" platform. Does this Intel 802.11n WLAN adapter work as well under Linux as their open-source graphics driver?

The short answer is that the Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 AGN does work "out of the box" under Linux, at least with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS where it was tested. After installing the PCI-E x1 WiFi card and attaching the antenna, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with the Linux 3.2 kernel was booted. To some surprise, everything worked just fine, including WPA/WEP! There was not any dealing with out-of-tree wireless driver, no ndiswrapper, no fiddling with firmware, or any other headaches. It just worked!

A few years back this would have been more thrilling to see as the WiFi adapter coverage has improved a great deal -- going from a messy and unreliable wreck to most network chipset vendors now supporting open-source Linux drivers. So seeing the Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 AGN work under Linux was great, though not entirely unexpected, especially for Intel.