ipw2200 Firmware Upgrade 
Thursday, October 18, 2007, 13:33 - technology
I have a Sony Vaio laptop that used to just run Kubuntu but now I have set it up as a dual-boot with WinXP on one side and Slackware 12 on the other. I have had a few problems and the biggest is getting LILO to work properly. When LILO is set properly, the WinXP side gives me a BSOD shortly after it's turned on and just hangs there with a system is shut down type message. However, when I use Bootmagic to select the Windows partition, the machine boots directly to Windows with no LILO screen. I can still boot to Slackware by inserting the Slackware CD and typing this at the prompt:

hugesmp.s root=/dev/hda2 rdinit= ro

which works but it's a pain to do. The second problem was the wireless connection. The module loaded on boot (ipw2200) but I could not start eth0; with the standard "eth0: error fetching interface connection: device not found" error. I did a "dmesg | grep ipw" showed these errors:

# dmesg | grep ipw
ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.2.0kmprq
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation
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
ipw2200: probe of 0000:06:04.0 failed with error -5


I found a fix on a Suse forum and that suggested updating the firmware would work; the firmware can be found here:

http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php

and I downloaded and installed version 3. I unpacked the tarball, changed to the directly and typed as root:

cp ipw2200-* /lib/firmware

and reloaded the ipw2200 module and restarted the network and wireless now works. Now, if I can only fix that LILO problem...

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