ipw2200 and network manager

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, 2005-05-19 at 07:42 -0700, malcolm northcott wrote:
> Ok, I read the firmware license myself looks like a typical legal team
> CYB effort. So that begs the question: Is there any way for the network
> setup tool to give a the user some more useful clue as to what is wrong.
> The network tool seems like the right place for this, since that is
> where most users will first encounter the issue.
> It seems like this sort of issue will probably become more common as the
> division between software and hardware continues to blur. Is there a
> more general mechanism for informing users that they have to agree
> company XXXX's license before they can use the hardware from XXXX?
> 	Mal.
> 
> PS. I apparently skirted past this issue on FC3 because I started using
> the ipw2200 driver before the modules were included in the FC3 kernel.
>  

This is really a kernel-side issue, specifically in drivers.  Drivers
currently call request_firmware() and get an error when the firmware is
not found.  Most drivers these days simply print a message to the
console/syslog and give up.  Were there a way to notify user-space that
there was missing firmware, then we could intelligently inform the user
about this issue.  David Zeuthen (of HAL fame) knows about this issue
and he and I have discussed it before.  Its something people are
thinking about and planning for, but its probably a 2.6.13 thing at the
earliest.

At the moment, there's really not much you can do other than
screenscraping the logs and string matching driver messages.

Dan