The lost firmware for ipw2200 module

Δευτέρα, 15 Μάϊος 2006, 11:39

Last night I felt like upgrading the linux kernel on my laptop (Sony Vaio VGN-FS215B) which runs an Ubuntu (Dapper). I prefer running a custom built kernel on this machine because, when using the precompiled kernels that come with the distribution, a lot of unwanted modules persist on mistakenly load themselfs. The previous kernel I had installed was 2.6.15.1 which was the latest kernel with Dapper when I decided to upgrade from Breezy. Now, 2.6.15.6 is available as a source package.

Taking all the steps by the book, untar, make oldconfig, make-kpkg kernel_image etc, in not so few minutes the deb package was ready. Reboot.

And then there were none... gouhou gouhou... there was no wlan0. dmesg showed me that the ipw2200 which controls the wireless device couldn't find the appropriate firmware. By checking with Documentation/networking/README.ipw2200 within the kernel tree, I found out that I had to download the firmware (from here) myself and put it in /lib/firmware/`uname -r`dir. Also the ipw2200 driver changed from version 1.0.10 in 2.6.15.1 kernel to 1.1.1 in the 12.6.15.6 kernel, which means that the already installed firmware is not usefull anymore.

This process of installing the firmware by hand in a base installation's directory, is so much not what I have been used to by the Ubuntu maintainers. After all the license does not prohibit redistribution as long as the license agreement goes with the product on the same directory. If not a package in an unofficial repository, at least an automatic download of the license agreement and then, if agreed by the user, the firmware itself would be nice.

Posted in Linux Stuff | 4 comments »

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Comments

Comment by Oneiros on Παρασκευή, 19 Μάϊος 2006, 04:24

gouhou gouhou

..is that a technical term? ;-p
Comment by Tassos Bassoukos on Παρασκευή, 19 Μάϊος 2006, 14:03

To be honest, I've forgotten when the last time was that I had to compile a Linux kernel. Nowadays the precompiled everything-in-modules kernel works just fine on all my hardware, and I don't consider four extra megs (resident, non-swappable) to have an effect.
Comment by jhn on Παρασκευή, 19 Μάϊος 2006, 14:45

and I don't consider four extra megs (resident, non-swappable) to have an effect

Neither do I, but, as mentioned already, I noticed back when I was using kernel 2.6.12 that some of the precompiled modules (generic drivers) got loaded instead of the right ones (specific drivers). This happened only in my vaio and since then I use a custom built kernel.
Comment by Tassos Bassoukos on Σάββατο, 20 Μάϊος 2006, 12:09

Ah, then the proper course of action would be to modify /etc/modprobe.d/local and set the proper modules for your hardware. Then run update-initramfs which will update the initrd images of the installed kernels with the new settings. Oh, and future kernel installations will honor these settings too.

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Another poor sysadmin

The lost firmware for ipw2200 module