IPW2200 - Unable to load firmware (solved)

[Toffer]

Hi, first time user of the forums, so please be patient. Thank you in advance for all help, and also a very helpful forum.

I have Gentoo 2.6.22-gentoo-r9, and my udev v. seems to be 115.

When I run dmesg | grep ipw2200, I get the following:

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ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.2.0km
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
ipw2200: ipw2200-bss.fw request_firmware failed: Reason -2
ipw2200: Unable to load firmware: -2
ipw2200: failed to register network device
ipw2200: probe of 0000:06:05.0 failed with error -5
kobject_add failed for ipw2200 with -EEXIST, don't try to register things with the same name in the same directory.

I have tried queen's [HOWTO] ipw2200 and udev 104 and kernel 2.6.19 without success, and spent the whole night reading threads around the web for answers.

My wlan-device is turned ON in bios-setup, I have loaded it as a module in kernel, and I've done emerge ipw2200-firmware.

Any tricks or hints will be deeply appreciated!

Kristoffer

[WakkaDojo]

Well I noticed you have older firmware; I have 1.2.2k.

Have you tried emerge -va =ipw2200-firmware-3.0?

Though queen's tutorial probably covers all applicable kernel configuration, you can check this website out:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_ipw2200
It addresses older kernels, but a lot of the configuration should be similar, perhaps it can give you some insight.

[Toffer]

Yep, I've emerged the 3.0 firmware.

And I've also gone through the gentoo-wiki more times than I can count.
But I'll do it again!

I'm in the beginning-phase of linux, so i thought there might be some obvious commands i've missed?

[WakkaDojo]

I noticed that I have ipw2200 compiled as a module yet i don't have it in the /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 configuration file. Weird, because queen suggests it be placed there. Anyway, having it there couldn't cause the problem.

When you recompiled the kernel, did you renew the images in your boot directory? If not then your kernel probably won't work with new configurations. What you want to do is copy the new image to the boot directory. This assumes you have an x86 architecture and your boot directory is mounted at /boot:

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cp /usr/src/linux-2.6.22-gentoo-r9/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/kernel-2.6.22-gentoo-r9

And make sure you have the following lines in your grub.conf, wherever it may be located (Probably under /boot/grub/grub.conf):

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title=Whatever you want
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.22-gentoo-r9 root=/dev/hda3

Then when you boot, you want to pick this one in the bootloader.

If you did update that stuff then forget all the junk I just put there, but if not, give it a try.

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I also noticed that in the wiki an almost identical problem arose with the version 2 firmware. Maybe you have multiple versions? Try

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emerge -C ipw2200-firmware
emerge -va =ipw2200-firmware-3.0

Maybe that will clear things up.

The problem in the wiki deals with telling udev how to load the firmware, and there is a solution, did you check it? It's under Trouble Loading Firmware 2

[Toffer]

Thank you WakkaDojo, for taking the time!

Well, the first steps in your post wich you describes as "junk", is completed. I copy the kernelimage everytime i recompile, and my grub.conf is correct.

I have also tried to remove firmware and re-emerge, with no result.

The trouble loading firmware 2 is the most similar error to mine, except for the ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:03:03.0 disabled.

So I've tried this fix, but I cant seem to locate the "extras"-dir to execute this;

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make EXTRAS=extras/firmware

.

I did all the above in that fix, but i got lost at that point.

[Toffer]

Apologies to the crowd, I screwed up on this one.

All of the 10-15 times times I tried to recompile the kernel and reboot, i did'nt mount the /boot partition, resulting in of course: the new kernel-config was never used.

I used the kernel-install-howto from the Gentoo install docs, where the root is allready mounted, so i missed that part about the /mount.

So I did this the right way, loaded ipw2200 as module, emerged the firmware (3.0) and after a reboot it connected to my wlan-router.

Solved.