wpi: "Radio transmitter is turned off"

[Dominic Fandrey]

Stacey Roberts wrote:
> Hi Bill!
>   
> 
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Bill Moran wrote:
> 
>> In response to Benjamin Close <Benjamin.Close at clearchain.com>:
>>
>>> Arne Schwabe wrote:
>>>> Bill Moran schrieb:
>>>>> I'm running 7 on an IBM Lenovo T61.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm having some weirdness with the 802.11 card.  It's a Intel Pro
>>>>> 3945ABG, which appears to be supported by the wpi driver.  Rebuilding
>>>>> the kernel with wpi support causes the NIC to be detected and a
>>>>> wpi0 interface is created, but when I do "ifconfig wpi0 up" I get
>>>>> a message that the radio transmitter is turned off.
>>>>>
>>>>> ?
>>>>>
>>>>> I've searched through the BIOS and the card is enabled everywhere I can
>>>>> find.  Perusing both the ifconfig and the wpi man page hasn't clued me
>>>>> in to what I can do to turn the radio on.  My google searches have
>>>>> turned up nothing but pointers to the wpi driver source code.
>>>>>
>>>>> Any advice/pointers will be welcome at this stage. :)
>>>>>
>>>>>   
>>>> Only to rule out the obvious. Is the wlan switch on your notebook in 
>>>> the right position?
>> Nice :)
> 
> So was this your problem?
> 
> I have the same notebook and have done the same procedure as you - enabling the hardware in
> the kernel, but the switch on the front of the laptop is set to "On" - always..,
> 
> However, although ifconfig show the card okay:
> 
> $ ifconfig wpi0
> wpi0: flags=8803<UP,BROADCAST,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
>         ether 00:1c:bf:5f:57:6f
>         media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect (autoselect)
>         status: no carrier
>         ssid "" channel 1 (2412 Mhz 11b)
>         authmode OPEN privacy OFF txpower 50 bmiss 7 scanvalid 60 bintval 0
> $
> 
> I get the following each time I try to ifconfig wpi0 up:
> 
> Feb  9 17:30:30 ibm-t61p kernel: firmware_get: failed to load firmware image wpifw
> Feb  9 17:30:30 ibm-t61p kernel: wpi0: could not load firmware image 'wpifw'
> Feb  9 17:30:30 ibm-t61p kernel: wpi0: A problem occurred loading the firmware to the driver
> Feb  9 17:30:55 ibm-t61p kernel: firmware_get: failed to load firmware image wpifw
> Feb  9 17:30:55 ibm-t61p kernel: wpi0: could not load firmware image 'wpifw'
> Feb  9 17:30:55 ibm-t61p kernel: wpi0: A problem occurred loading the firmware to the driver

Did you set the necessary flags in your loader.conf? I'm talking about:
legal.intel_wpi.license_ack=1