[the] Code Girl (aka UnrulyGrrl)

I noticed that my wireless would randomly stop working ever since I upgraded Ubuntu Linux from Breezy to Dapper. syslog showed a lot of:

ipw2200: Firmware error detected.  Restarting.

I tried installing the latest firmware…and STILL got these errors constantly.

Dapper uses v1.1.1 of the ipw2200 driver, and Breezy used the 1.0.6 version. The kernel was also upgrade from 2.6.12 to 2.6.15. I’m not the only one complaining about this issue, as I found several posts at the Ubuntu forums. Loading the older kernel from the GRUB bootup menu didn’t help (i couldn’t even get the ipw2200 driver to load at all).

I didn’t want to deal with compiling a new or old ipw2200 driver from source merely in the hopes that it would work. I have things TO DO. last weekend, after I had unloaded and reload ipw2200 module at least 5 times within the space of 2 or 3 hours, I gave the #*%& up on it, and ran a long piece of Cat5e from my office to the family room. I’ve been zipping along at 100MBps since then and have not had a single problem since.

You may want to think twice about upgrading from Breezy to Dapper if you have an Intel wireless chipset that uses the ipw2200 driver/module.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 8th, 2006 at 9:19 pm and is filed under linux, 802.11abgn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.