I'm in my second week of trying to get my wireless card to work. I have a Dell inspiron 9300 laptop with the intel wireless card.

I have installed the driver.
I have the wireless extensions.
I have the wireless tools.
I have the 2.6.9 kernel running below red hat linux enterprise ed.

Everything works fine exept for the firmware loading.
Trying a dmesg | grep ipw2200:

[bjornart@localhost ~]$ dmesg | grep ipw2200
ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 0.13
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2004 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
ipw2200: ipw2200_boot.fw load failed
ipw2200: Unable to load firmware: 0xFFFFFFFE
ipw2200: failed to register network device
ipw2200: probe of 0000:03:03.0 failed with error -5
ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.0.0
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2004 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection

According to /etc/hotplug/firmware.agent:
# directory of the firmware files
FIRMWARE_DIR=/lib/firmware


Output of /lib/firmware:
[bjornart@localhost firmware]$ ls -l
total 491
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 114688 Sep 22 2004 BCM2033-FW.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3245 Sep 22 2004 BCM2033-MD.hex
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 122 Sep 22 2004 BCM-LEGAL.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6472 Sep 11 20:08 ipw-2.2-boot.fw
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 166960 Sep 11 20:08 ipw-2.2-bss.fw
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16334 Sep 11 20:08 ipw-2.2-bss_ucode.fw
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 161568 Sep 11 20:08 ipw-2.2-ibss.fw
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16312 Sep 11 20:08 ipw-2.2-ibss_ucode.fw
[bjornart@localhost firmware]$


Everything is there! Note that one of the errors was
ipw2200: ipw2200_boot.fw load failed

That is, a different name for the firmware file!
I tried changing the names with only more errors.
Now it asked for ipw-2.2-boot.fw!


I just get this error when trying to activate the card:
Error for wireless request "Set Bit Rate" (8B20) :
SET failed on device eth1 ; Operation not supported.


The user manual says:
The Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Driver for Linux supports loading of
firmware via the Linux firmware hotplug capability. In order to use
this, you must enable CONFIG_FW_LOADER in your kernel configuration.
In 2.6.x this option is enabled via:

Device Drivers ->
Generic Driver Options ->
Hotplug firmware loading support


Where/how do I enable this option? I mean, where/how to I find Device Drivers-> Generic Driver Options ??? Do I use a special program for this?

What could be wrong here?

read this

hardware compatibility list

http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/sh...cat=140&page=1

should be some help hopefully

Hi! Thanks for your reply!

Yes, I had a look at those RPMs (by the way, there is a Linux tutorial on this very same site about the same RPMs).

Only thing is, I had to have the 2.6.11 kernel, mine is 2.6.9. I have no idea how to replace my kernel, besides I don't know if Red Hat likes that.
Anyway, I's an agony that one has to change the whole kernel just to make a wireless card work.

I'm actually considering switching to Ubuntu or Debian... Heard that Ubuntu is supposed to me much more user friendly...
What are your comments on that?

The Red Hat I'm running now is the Enterprise Edition.

it does happen every now and then that you have to recompile your kernel

what might work is this tho

yum update *kernel*

(with the stars)

if your new to linux and you have no ties to your red hat system then switch. personally i'm a die hard red hat fan but each to their own. new users are always advised to 'shop' arround and try different distros to see which they like best

just as a matter of interest how come you've got the enterprise version of red hat and not fedora?

second did you try following the tutorial because even if it says you need a certain kernel it might still work

i see its on a laptop. i have no experience with wireless or linux on laptops but from what i've read a popular solution is to use a 'wrapper' and then the windows drivers. a bit like wine except just for drivers.

i think the one everyone uses is called ndis wrapper just google for that and see what comes about. there should be a thread already running telling you how to configure ndis wrapper so its probably better to have a look for that.

if you like the 'feel' of redhat tho it might be worth trying fedora core 4 which has got the 2.6.11 kernel
but try using the above yum command first

what might work is this tho
yum update *kernel*
(with the stars)


Thank you for your interesting reply, I'll try that!



if your new to linux and you have no ties to your red hat system then switch. personally i'm a die hard red hat fan but each to their own. new users are always advised to 'shop' arround and try different distros to see which they like best
just as a matter of interest how come you've got the enterprise version of red hat and not fedora?

I'm a Master student in Computer Science and that was the distro my faculty offered me. I even got a license key for updates!



second did you try following the tutorial because even if it says you need a certain kernel it might still work


Yes I did. Just got an error message saying that I had the wrong kernel verison number. Thanks anyway! Think I'm going for ubuntu to start with.

comp sci - good lad.

same here

we didn't get red hat given tho

never mind.

tried with the yum command:
[root@localhost /]# yum update *kernel*
bash: yum: command not found
[root@localhost /]#

I tried to do a "find * yum" from the root but no such file or directory could be found...

Where is this command located anyway?

Even though I've written my own operating system kernel from scratch (including 32 bit paging mechanisms, semaphore and monitor synchronization primitivs),
it doesn't help me very much when it comes to Linux. :-)

maybe you haven't got yum then

try downloading it (just google)

you you've already compiled your own kernel then?

No I haven't compiled my own kernel. I just followed the installation instructions from Red Hat and installed it on a clean partition...

Anyway, it says that it cannot load the ipw2200_boot.fw file.
In my firmware directory I have the ipw-2.2-boot.fw file (notice the different file name).

I tried changing the name from ipw-2.2-boot.fw to ipw2200_boot.fw ,
but then it said that it couldn't load ipw-2.2-boot.fw !

Well, this is a bit messy, but I feel that I'm very close to having it work now.
Only the firmware thing left...

try making a copy of it so you've got one of each?

This is getting more and more fun. I downloaded and installed the RPM firmware package from Redhat and now the firmware problem seems to be gone. However, I received more errors:

[bjornart@localhost ~]$ dmesg | grep ipw2200
ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 0.13
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2004 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.0.0
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2004 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
ipw2200: No space for Tx
ipw2200: failed to send SCAN_REQUEST_EXT command
ipw2200: Already sending a command
ipw2200: failed to send TX_POWER command
ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.0.0
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2004 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
[bjornart@localhost ~]$


Does this indicate that I have several drivers installed? And what is the solution in that case?

As of writing, I'm running Ubuntu from the Live CD. And guess what?
The wireless card worked perfectly (hey I'm posting this!) without any tweaking around. Also Ubuntu started up in the correct resolution (1900x1200) without any configuring (it took me a week in Red Hat). It is amazing. Yup, think I'm going for Ubuntu.

well good on you.
my laptop arrived yesterday and has a similar if not the same wireless card so i guess i'll have to go down the ubuntu line although i'm considering gentoo.

it does seem like you have 2 drivers installed
RE: I tried changing the names with only more errors.
Now it asked for ipw-2.2-boot.fw!

who knows.

sometimes its just better to start fresh

happy hotspotting and wish me luck!!

good luck m8 and thanks for all your help! ;-)