FC3 lost my wireless network device - solved

Robert Hart hartr at interweft.com.au
Tue Jan 11 00:32:12 UTC 2005


On Mon, 2005-01-10 at 08:47 +1000, Robert Hart wrote:

> I'm stumped. I use an internal Intel wlan2100 wireles network card in my
> Toshiba laptop.

Well, after a bit of a fight, I now have the device working. Just for
the record, here's what I did.

1) Despite the fact that the Linuxant driver had been working fine on
FC3, upgrading to the -724stk16 kernel from Linuxant and rebooting
resulted in the card not being found (Linux complained it could not
start the card). Downgrading to the -681stk16 kernel that had been
working fine before did not fix the problem, but the wireless adapter
worked fine in Windows XP.

2) I knew there was a community driver project, so I thought I'd try
that to see if it could give me some diagnostic information. It's been a
while since I last looked at this and it had reached v1.0, so I
downloaded the ipw2100 rpms from atrpms.net

3) Ii nstalled all the right ipw2100 RPMs for my kernel, but this did
not help - the kernel could sort of see the device, but it could not be
configured. I trolled through /var/log/messages again and found a
reference to 'could not find ipw2100 firmware'. I don't remember seeing
this before, but it might have been there before...and as the firmware
rpm had not been installed until after the boot, then I could understand
what might be the problem.

4) So I rebooted - and hey presto the kernel could talk to the card and
I was able to configure it just fine!

The docs really ought to make the point that you do have to reboot to
get the firmware loaded. Apart from kernel installs, this is the only
time I can think of that a reboot is necessary - and so making it
explicit that this should happen is probably a good idea!

-- 
Robert Hart                                      hartr at interweft.com.au
+61 (0)438 385 533
Brisbane, Australia                        http://www.hart.wattle.id.au




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