ipw2100 on debian testing - No working leases - sleeping
 

I am running debian testing (I think that it is now 'lenny') on my laptop, a Fujitsu S6120

I reinstalled it lastnight (13 April 2007) using a netinstall CD and then installed the laptop & standard packages during setup, and after reboot my own little script to load just the packages I want. I have done this previously and wireless worked, plus I use the same script on my desktop & wireless works on it, albeit it uses madwifi instead of ipw2100. All things I do are done the 'debian' way via aptitude.

I believe that linux-image-2.6.18-4-686 which is what I have, already has support for ipw2100 & iee80211 - I just loaded the ipw2100 (v1.3) into /lib/firmware. I installed wpasupplicant and added to /etc/network/interfaces the following:
iface eth2 inet dhcp
wpa-driver wext
wpa-ssid XXXXXXX
wpa-psk A_plain_text_passphrase (same works on my desktop)

When I boot up the laptop, running dmesg | grep ipw shows that ipw2100 was found and loaded. But when I try the command sudo ifup eth2 it gives me 6 lines of DHCPDISCOVER on eth2 ....
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

I may be overlooking something really simple, and have looked at google all day and tried a few things, most of which relate to other versions of linux ie slackware etc, which have file locations that debian doesn't - nothing seems to work.

I'm at a loss as to why it worked a month ago, but not now. The only thing I think is causing it is ieee802, as on my desktop when I do iwconfig it has atho IEEE 802.11g etc. The IEEE80211 doesn't appear when I do it on my laptop.

If anyone has any suggestions, please give me commands etc to run as I'm a noob (as I've seen many other people describe themselves).

(I somehow submitted this before finishing, and then submitted a complete post which has since been closed - so I have modified this post to reflect my full question.)

I have since seen that there are bug reports for building ieee80211-source but as it and ipw2100 are included in the kernel I'm using, they shouldn't be the cause. So I'm at a loss, anyone got any suggestions?

For any that read this post - it was my own fault. It pays to know your hardware - the Fujitsu S6120 has a little switch at the back that turns wireless on & off. All I had to do was turn it on! Now wireless works and works brilliantly.