Wireless networking

I am using an Intel® PRO/Wireless 2200 chip in my Inspiron laptop. When I first installed Fedora Core 3, I installed the firmware and drivers and achieved wireless nirvana with little difficulty. However, sometime along the way, this functionality disappeared. It happened to me a few kernels into Fedora Core 4. It wasn't really troubling me since I've been using my laptop in tethered environments lately. My colleague, Darin, sparked my interest, however, when he informed me that his wireless capability magically reappeared after upgrading to 2.6.14.

This kernel includes the ieee80211 and ipw2200 modules, obviating the need to maintain those by hand. In addition, the wireless tools are now a yum-accessible rpm called wireless-tools. This leaves only the firmware to maintain manually. Forward progress!

Unfortunately, I did not meet with the same success. I noticed in the 'dmesg' output that the ipw2200 modules was actually trying to access a particular firmware version number, 2.2. I had maintained my wireless packages to some degree and had already upgraded to 2.3. This turned out to be my undoing. Apparently the version of ipw2200 that is shipped with the kernel is slightly older.

I downgraded to 2.2, and all is right with the world again. This little nugget of knowledge does not seem to be on the website of the ipw2200 team, hence the motivation to share in my blog.

The conclusion is be aware of firmware versions when using the default ieee80211 and ipw2200 drivers.