I am having some difficulty with my Intel 4965AGN wireless card on openSuSE 11. Basic problem: I can’t get wlan0 up after I completely shut off the power to my notebook. However I am dual booting with vista and after reconnecting the power, booting vista and the rebooting into suse it works fine.
This leads me to think that somehow vista is loading something non-persistent into the device, linux isn’t. I’m not sure but firmware might be the proper term for this data.
The ifup output suggests that the firmware adds an additional “authentication-interface” to the device but since this isn’t active it returns “Operation not supported”.
linux-ssouffri:/home/ssouffri # ifup wlan0
wlan0 device: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN Network Connection (rev 61)
wlan0 warning: WPA configured but may be unsupported
wlan0 warning: by this device
wlan0 starting wpa_supplicant
SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such file or directory
Could not set interface 'wlan0' UP
WEXT auth param 4 value 0x0 - ioctl[SIOCSIWAUTH]: Operation not supported
Starting DHCP Client Daemon on wlan0... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . no IP address yet... backgrounding.
interface wlan0 is not up
So my question is how to get the “firmware” to load. After some research I found the file /lib/firmware/README.iwlwifi-4965-ucode. Maybe this will help. Thanks in advance.
Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN Adapter
Copyright (C) 2006 - 2007 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.
Microcode Package README.iwlwifi-4965-ucode
INDEX
1. OVERVIEW
2. INSTALLATION
3. LICENSE
1. OVERVIEW
The file iwlwifi-4965-1.ucode provided in this package must be
present on your system in order for the Intel Wireless WiFi Link
4965AGN driver for Linux (iwlwifi-4965) to operate on your system.
The "-1" in the filename reflects an interface/architecture version number.
It will change only when changes in new uCode releases make the new uCode
incompatible with earlier drivers.
On adapter initialization, and at varying times during the uptime of
the adapter, the microcode is loaded into the RAM on the network
adapter. The microcode provides the low level MAC features including
radio control and high precision timing events (backoff, transmit,
etc.) while also providing varying levels of packet filtering which can
be used to keep the host from having to handle packets that are not of
interest given the current operating mode of the device.
2. INSTALLATION
The iwlwifi-4965 driver will look for the file iwlwifi-4965-1.ucode using the
kernel's firmware_loader infrastructure. In order to function
correctly, you need to have this support enabled in your kernel. When
you configure the kernel, you can find this option in the following
location:
Device Drivers ->
Generic Driver Options ->
Hotplug firmware loading support
You can determine if your kernel currently has firmware loader support
by looking for the CONFIG_FW_LOADER definition on your kernel's
.config.
In addition to having the firmware_loader support in your kernel, you
must also have a working hotplug and udev infrastructure configured.
The steps for installing and configuring hotplug and udev are very
distribution specific.
Once you have the firmware loader in place (or if you aren't sure and
you just want to try things to see if it works), you need to install
the microcode file into the appropriate location.
Where that appropriate location is depends (again) on your system
distribution. You can typically find this location by looking in the
hotplug configuration file for your distro:
% grep \"^FIRMWARE_DIR\" /etc/hotplug/firmware.agent
This should give you output like:
FIRMWARE_DIR=/lib/firmware
If it lists more than one directory, you only need to put the
microcode in one of them. In the above example, installation is
simply:
% cp iwlwifi-4965-1.ucode /lib/firmware
You can now load the driver (see the INSTALL and README.iwlwifi provided with
the iwlwifi package for information on building and using that driver.)
3. LICENSE
The microcode in this package (iwlwifi-4965.ucode) is provided under the
terms of the following license (available in the file
LICENSE.iwlwifi-4965-ucode):
Copyright (c) 2006, Intel Corporation.
All rights reserved.
Redistribution. Redistribution and use in binary form, without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
met:
* Redistributions must reproduce the above copyright notice and the
following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials
provided with the distribution.
* Neither the name of Intel Corporation nor the names of its suppliers
may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
without specific prior written permission.
* No reverse engineering, decompilation, or disassembly of this software
is permitted.
Limited patent license. Intel Corporation grants a world-wide,
royalty-free, non-exclusive license under patents it now or hereafter
owns or controls to make, have made, use, import, offer to sell and
sell ("Utilize") this software, but solely to the extent that any
such patent is necessary to Utilize the software alone, or in
combination with an operating system licensed under an approved Open
Source license as listed by the Open Source Initiative at
http://opensource.org/licenses. The patent license shall not apply to
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