Hi,
the original poster (me ;), got the card (ipw2200) working, would very like to use the gentoo methods, but wasn't able to get wpa_supplicant (masked) to work. He tried to ebuild wpa_supplicant and the (needless) madwifi was downloaded and installed too amd the build failed. The (gentoo installed) hotplug didn't load the firmware. That's why I unmerged this too and installed it by hand. It's working now.
Hotplug loading firmware is a kernel option, which iirc is off by default (Device Drivers=>Generic Driver Options=>Hotplug firmware loading support)
Hotplug firmware loading support (FW_LOADER)
This option is provided for the case where no in-kernel-tree modules require hotplug firmware loading support, but a module built outside the kernel tree does.
If this option was not set, presumably hotplug (or coldplug, whichever) would not be able to load the firmware.
Maybe the firmware problem is caused by the fact that gentoo by some reason /usr/lib/hotplug moved to /lib/hotplug.
Or possibly this functionality would be controlled by *cold*plug and not hotplug (since the card is plugged in at boot). Seems like a lot of people don't know about/miss the existence of coldplug (through no fault of their own; it just doesn't seem to be properly publicized).
Well, /usr could be a filesystem which still isn't mounted when the firmware is needed but I don't have an idea in which cases this could happen.
In any case, glad you got it working. Just some tips in case you want to try again to use the "Gentoo methods". I don't have such a card, so these are just suggestions as to what may have gone wrong, based on your report and my familiarity with dealing with the kernel and drivers-- no guarantees :-) .
Holly
Regards Frank
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