IPW2200 on FC6

Sorry, I still haven't written up my full notes on getting Fedora Core 6 running on my Sony Vaio Type T laptop, but one tidbit:

Sometimes when I boot, the initialization of the IPW2200 builtin WLAN interface doesn't happen properly. This symptom is this:

[rdv@localhost ~]$ iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

__tmp1804289383  IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"xxxx"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: 00:07:40:xx:xx:xx   
          Bit Rate:54 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm   Sensitivity=8/0  
          Retry limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=62/100  Signal level=-63 dBm  Noise level=-85 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:482   Missed beacon:20

eth0      no wireless extensions.

sit0      no wireless extensions.

and networking fails to work. This condition sometimes persists over reboots, it seems, though as far as I can tell it's just a random phenomenon, so I don't know why it would persist.

The solution is:

[root@localhost rdv]# rmmod ipw2200
[root@localhost rdv]# modprobe !$
modprobe ipw2200
[root@localhost rdv]# iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

sit0      no wireless extensions.

eth1      IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"xxxx"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: 00:07:40:xx:xx:xx   
          Bit Rate:54 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm   Sensitivity=8/0  
          Retry limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=67/100  Signal level=-60 dBm  Noise level=-86 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:10

Hope this helps somebody; meantime, if any of you know why it's happening and how to stop it from happening, let me know.