ipw2100 on SID
 

Hi,
I just upgraded my laptop (Packard Bell Easynote) from Sarge to SID and now my wiFi is not working anymore.

I use a stock kernel (2.6.8-2-686) since a custom one won't work for me and AFAIK this is still the same kernel as I used in Sarge.

After upgrading I tried a bunch of things but nothing worked.

1. The module-assistand instructions I found on various sites on the net all failed with a build error (and so did the manual installation);

2. I manually installed the hostap driver (latest version 0.45 or something) and that seemed to work, but the latest ipw2100 drivers didn't install both version 1.2.1 and 1.2.0 failed with a similar error as the module-assistant method).

3. I finally got the ipw2100-1.1.0 driver installed (it's not the latest one but at least it compiled fine and it loads with modprobe) but I still can't use the wifi since it won't load the firmware :

I've searched with google on this problem but the only thing I can find is that the firmware needs to be in /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware or /lib/firmware I tried both but it still faild.

Finally I found a post here about hotplug not beeing set but udev instead but that's also not the case here since when I did the command the posted did I got the correct reply and not the udev one

:Is there anyone who can help me so I can unplug the wired LAN and roam with the laptop on the WiFi.

Thanks

hello,
did you finally get it to work? please let me know,
because my 2100 3b wireless card is not working, and the symptoms
are the same as yours,
thank you,
eliezer faizal

Both control driver version and firmware version.
maybe driver dont support that firmware.

so, where i can get those two files (driver and firmware), from
the sourceforge.net? i'm actually using suse 10, and they change
path/location, so most solutions i found in the net won't work,
can you tell me more about this? as i'm really stuck in here...
thanks,
eliezer faizal

Did you search the Novell site for information ?
Before I installed Debian on my laptop I had it running SuSE 10 (the commercial one, so it had some more stuff then the OSS version I guess). The card worked perfectly with the SuSE 10 Live-CD but it failed after first installation of SuSE 10, I had to manually add some stuff that SuSE didn't include in it's base installation (probably because it's non-free software or something like that).
Getting the card to work on SuSE 10 was much easier for me then on Debian.

I finally decided to manually install NDiswrapper and that worked but only for a short time. I don't know what changed (maybe some updated stuff in the SID repositories) because after a while the module-assistant method of installing worked and it compiled the ipw2100 module correctly.
It not works pretty well, the only problem I have is that it seems to support WEP encryption but when I enable it on the Wireless Access Point and in Debian the connection is lost and it can't reconnect (so I guess there is still a WEP problem on the Debian side, or probably just some misconfiguration by me :rolleyes: )

If you upgrade your kernel to something post-2.6.14, ipw2100 support is included (finally!). All you have to do is put the firmware in the right place and as udev loads, the wireless will come up automatically.