Fedora Core 6 & ipw2200

I was having trouble making my wireless work with the new Fedora. After several (failed) tries of using the repositories to install the ipw2200 firmware, I gave up. I just refused to work. Whenever I tried to initialize the wireless adaptor I’d get an error back that my “ipw2200 device eth1 does not seem to be present”. But today I was at the library and the only network available was wireless. So I thought to give it one more try. I booted my Fedora and looked at /var/log/messages. I found an interesting section which read:

ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.1.2kmprq
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Network Connection
ipw2200: ipw2200-bss.fw request_firmware failed: Reason -2
ipw2200: Unable to load firmware: -2
ipw2200: failed to register network device
ipw2200: probe of 0000:03:03.0 failed with error -5

Interesting… there’s something wrong with the firmware. Maybe I should try doing it by hand then! I downloaded the lastest version of the ipw2200 firmware and extracted the contents in /lib/firmware. Then I unloaded and reloaded the driver:

/sbin/rmmod ipw2200
/sbin/modprobe ipw2200

I opened my wireless manager and voila! Everything worked! I wish I knew what those install rpms were trying to do, but since all is ok now I don’t intend to try and find out!