Had my wireless working flawlessly under FC5, but FC6 will not reload the driver unless it's powered down. I tried something I found elsewhere (an upgrade? to the ieeeetc. stuff) but it broke my wireless and made my heart stop until I reversed what I had done.

I'm using gnome, network manager - I noticed in my logs that eth1 was up and down a few times during a restart.

Anyhow, it *seems* that I have to power right down in order for ipw2200 to load on bootup. Wondering if I'm the only one.


cheers,

my wireless card (bg 2200 on dell Insp 6000) is flaky too.


Sometime I have to unload the module, reload it, then set the parameters myself

#> rmmod ipw2200
#> insmod /path/to/module/ipw2200.ko

#> /sbin/iwconfig eth1 essid YOURSSID mode managed rate auto key YOURWEPKEY

#> dhclient -1 eth1

im using FC6 and the internal wireless ipw2200 on eth1 same as you. Mine works fine. I put some stuff rc.local to configure it on boot with my essid and wep key that's all I had to do aside fron installing the RPM driver. Here's my rc.local that makes it work. Works everytime. I added a few sleep commands and it seems to help for me.

/etc/rc.local

iwconfig eth1 essid xxxxxx
sleep 2
iwconfig eth1 channel 6
sleep 2
iwconfig eth1 key open xxxxxxxxx
sleep 2
dhclient eth1

Perhaps this is caused by pci sleep states. (Note, I don't know much about Fedora specifics), whatever power-management system your kernel uses (acpi or apm), pci drivers are supposed to be able to respond to power states. You generally go into power state S5 when shutting down (S4 is suspend-to-ram). S0 is running. The cool thing about the linux sysfs hooks is that you can control the device states for individual pci objects rather than the entire system at once. To do this, you probably need to know the number of the specific pci device you want to control (which you can find from lspci).

Turn on the computer from a cold start, and verify that the card works. Then restart the computer, and verify that the card doesn't work. Now, you do the fun part. (First, get root privileges, and then), cd to /sys/devices. Most PCs have only one pci-bus; you should cd into the directory representing it (on my computer, it's pci0000:00). Now, use the number for your device to cd into the directory representing the wireless NIC (on my computer, it's 0000:00:0a.0). Now cd into the directory called power. Do a cat state. You should see the output "0" (the numeral). This indicates the devices is up and running. Now change this with "echo '5' > state" (causing the PCI device to shutdown). Now, do "cat state" to make sure it worked (it may take a few seconds). If it reports "5", then most probably it worked (you can double check by looking for absense of blinking lights). Now do "echo '0' > state". Make sure it worked (i.e., with cat). Now, try bringing up the interface. If it works, then your problem is the pci sleep state.

The easiest remedy for this would be to add a script/service/whatever fedora calls it to be run at restart. This script would just set the network device's state to 5 and wait some time. When the computer is rebooted, the device should wake up, and you might be able to use it. The second, but more reliable method is to add a script do the boot sequence which puts the device to sleep, waits a bit, and wakes up the device (just as we did above).