IPW2100 with Fedora Core 6 on IBM T41

[jyoon]

Hi,

I am using IBM T41 with IPW2100, and just recently installed FC6 (yay~).

So everything is perfect except the wireless (not new...). However, but my problem is that if i go under System->Administration->Network, the OS actually recognizes the wireless card.

However, it's set at inactive, and when I try to activate it, it says "ipw2100 device eth1 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization."

I don't know if that means I need to go through the driver, firmware installation again, or if the problem is the ibm's "function" key that is not enabled.

IBM laptops have the function+F5 to turn on the wireless, which seems to be not functioning under linux. However, when I had the FC5, I didn't have to contemplate, because the System->Administration->Network didn't even show the iwp2100 device at all, so I just went ahead and installed everything and it was fine. But now that it's actually showing under the network manager, i don't know if it's the wireless driver problem, or if it's "turning-on" the wireless card problem. I don't want to test it out either because I have way too many documents that I can't lose, and I am away from home in a hotel (so I can't even back it up now). So if anybody had a similar problem, it will be great to hear from you.

 

Thanks.