Arch Linux

kandrews

Member

Registered: 2007-04-21

Posts: 119

X41 wireless not loading firmware at boot [Solved]

Hi,

I have a Lenovo X41T with an ipw2200 chipset for which I have installed ipw2200-fw from pacman. I have ipw2200 as my last module in the MODULES section in rc.conf. When I start my computer, my ipw2200 driver complains that the firmware is not being loaded. I checked the ipw2200 driver homepage and it listed two possible reasons for why it was giving the error: either the firmware was incompatible with the driver in the kernel or /sys was not being mounted at boot. So I added sys to my fstab and rebooted. I received the same error. However, if other people have no problems using the ipw2200 driver then it means that something else is wrong.

I tried navigating into /sys/ and found a 'firmware' directory. The only thing in that directory is 'acpi'. Do other users of the ipw2200 driver have firmware installed in the /sys directory? Is there something else that is causing this problem?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I should also mention that the driver works after I rmmod ipw2200; modprobe ipw2200. It would just be a lot more nifty if I didn't have to do that.

EDIT 2: Here is my rc.conf as well as the errors I am seeing: http://pastebin.archlinux.org/13605

EDIT 3: I think that my initrd is trying to load the ipw2200 module before the filesystem has been mounted.

Last edited by kandrews (2007-09-02 01:17:02)

kandrews

Member

Registered: 2007-04-21

Posts: 119

Re: X41 wireless not loading firmware at boot [Solved]

I figured out that I needed to add the firmware hook to mkinitcpio.conf and regenerate the initrd with regenerate the initrd with

mkinitcpio -p kernel26

.