I was able to install the my intel wireless card on my IBM R51 laptop. After I restarted, it stopped working. Here is the error I got. I can see the firmware isn't loading. I don't understand why it worked at first and not now.

ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
divert: allocating divert_blk for eth1
eth0: no IPv6 routers present
ipw2200: ipw2200_boot.fw load failed
ipw2200: Unable to load firmware: 0xFFFFFFFE
divert: freeing divert_blk for eth1
ipw2200: failed to register network device
ipw2200: probe of 0000:02:02.0 failed with error -5

I have followed these instructions. Everything worked fine until the end when it was time to load the modules with the . load. Here is what I get.

[root@localhost ipw2200-0.10]# . load
bash: lsmod: command not found
bash: lsmod: command not found
bash: lsmod: command not found
bash: lsmod: command not found
No modules unloaded.
bash: lsmod: command not found
bash: modprobe: command not found
bash: insmod: command not found
bash: insmod: command not found
bash: insmod: command not found
bash: insmod: command not found
No modules loaded.

Are you running insmod as root or as a normal user?

edit:

that was a dumb suggestion. allow me to take it back.

Just looked at the instructions you mentioned and the .load command seems to be something you do to only temporarily load the modules after compiling them. if you do "make install" instead your installation should survive the shutdown.


-geomatt

When I run . load I get this
[root@localhost ipw2200-0.10]# . load
bash: lsmod: command not found
bash: lsmod: command not found
bash: lsmod: command not found
bash: lsmod: command not found
No modules unloaded.
bash: lsmod: command not found
bash: modprobe: command not found
bash: insmod: command not found
bash: insmod: command not found
bash: insmod: command not found
bash: insmod: command not found
No modules loaded.

insmod command not found as well as no modules loaded.

insmod: command not found
either means that you are running it as an ordinary user or that the installation script .load is looking in the wrong place for it. Since you seem to be running it as root it seems to be the latter.

Did you try installing the driver with "make install"? That would put it in a place where insmod would be able to find it.

What happens when you do modprobe ipw2200?

-geomatt

Nope. Still no good.

[root@localhost sbin]# ./modprobe ipw2200
[root@localhost sbin]#

I had to run modprobe from /sbin. I can't create a link so it looks in /sbin for commands?

Two issues here:
1. modprobe is a command that you should be able to run from anywhere, since the /sbin directory is the default location for system commands. Check your PATH environment variable to see whether /sbin is included - the PATH variable just tells your system where to look for programs to execute so you don't have to spell out the entire location where they are kept.

Running "set" without the quotes will list all of the environment variables. You can add /sbin if it's not there by running

export PATH="$PATH:/sbin" (with the quotes)

2. If you run modprobe and don't get any response it probably means that it worked! To see if the module is loaded type "lsmod" without the quotes and look through the list to see if ipw2200 is there. If it is then it's just a matter of getting it to load automatically at boot-up time.

btw - what distro are you using? I am using slackware and my experience with a similar driver ipw2100 on an ibm R40 thinkpad is with slackware 9.1 and 10.0.....

-geomatt

Nope. Still not loading. Samething as before.

I have an IBM R51 running Fedora 2.

How does it run with Slackware? I have been planning on changing from Redhat for sometime now. I have read that other distros are more user friendly. That would be great. As much as I love linux. I am getting sick of gettings things to work and problems like this. Now that I installed Fedora, sleeping doesn't work, and the touch pad won't tap. I just don't have the time to be fixing this all. But thanks for the info and the help.

No problem, but I'm afraid I'm not being much help.....

I didn't really have any trouble with the ipw2100 driver on slackware 10.0. I just installed it in the usual way - make, make install. When I upgraded the kernel from the default 2.4.26 to 2.6.8 things got easier because there was more wireless stuff in the kernel. What I did to get everything working was manually copied the firmware to the directory specified by the ipw2100 docs, compiled and installed the driver (plus an additional driver to get WEP encryption working) and then conifigured the wireless card - pretty straightforward. Looking over the docs for your driver it seems similar.

Maybe you should start again from scratch - as long as you are sure you've got the firmware in the right directory - run make clean in the ipw source code directory and then make and make install and see what modprobe does for you.

As for sleeping when I close the lid - that is taken care of out of the box by slackware. Tap clicking was a little bit of an issue, but I solved it by installing the synaptics driver (google for it) and then adding a second mouse in xorg.conf - so I could get the full functionality of the touchpad and the extra buttons between it and the keyboard.

But maybe this is too much tinkering for your taste. I like to mess around under the hood trying to get things to work. That's why I like Linux because I can do that and not (usually) screw things up too badly.....

-geomatt