Using Intel 2200BG wireless under Gentoo

Using Intel 2200BG wireless under Gentoo

Trouble Loading Firmware 2

If you get the following:

ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
ipw2200: ipw2200-bss.fw request_firmware failed: Reason -2
ipw2200: Unable to load firmware: -2
ipw2200: failed to register network device
ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:03:03.0 disabled
ipw2200: probe of 0000:03:03.0 failed with error -5

In the latest distribution of Gentoo(kernel>=2.6.23-r3, and udev>=115-r1), everything configuration files are OK now. You may find

    SUBSYSTEM=="firmware", ACTION=="add", RUN+="firmware.sh 

in the file/etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules. Even list ipw2200 in /etc/modules.autoload/kernel-2.6 is unnecessary now.

However, if you compiled the driver into the kernel, you may suffer this problem. One way to solve it is to regenerate the kernel and compile the driver as a module.

Also you may apply this patch : http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/patches/ipw2200-1.2.2-close_intf.patch

For more informations, visit : http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202557

If it's not because of this, or you use a relatively old version of kernel, you may read the solutions below.

The reason is very simple (From bugzilla id 202557)
When the ipw2200 driver is built into the kernel (not as a module), it attempts to load firmware from a file on disk while the kernel is initializing, which of course fails because there is no filesystem at this point in time.


The whole article can be found in http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_ipw2200