Intel Centrino 6200 wireless card not working

Rocky Linux Tech Help
1

Hi,

I just installed Rocky Linux 9 on a battered Lenovo Thinkpad laptop. Everything seems to run nicely, except the wireless card. Up until yesterday, the laptop ran OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (which hadn’t been updated for at least a year or two as far as I can tell), but the wireless card worked perfectly on this distribution.

Here’s the card:

# lspci | grep -i net
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82577LM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 06)
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Advanced-N 6200 (rev 35)

The driver seems to load OK:

# lsmod | grep iwl
iwlwifi               417792  0
cfg80211             1290240  1 iwlwifi

But the expected interface is nowhere to be found:

# ifconfig -a
enp0s25: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.2.171  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.2.255
        inet6 fe80::f2de:f1ff:fe19:a256  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether f0:de:f1:19:a2:56  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 670  bytes 57914 (56.5 KiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 174  bytes 28637 (27.9 KiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0
        device interrupt 20  memory 0xf2600000-f2620000  

lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING>  mtu 65536
        inet 127.0.0.1  netmask 255.0.0.0
        inet6 ::1  prefixlen 128  scopeid 0x10<host>
        loop  txqueuelen 1000  (Local Loopback)
        RX packets 10  bytes 1660 (1.6 KiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 10  bytes 1660 (1.6 KiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

(Yeah I know, ifconfig… old habits die hard.)

I gave the kernel-ml from ELRepo a spin, but to no avail. Same result.

So before haphazardly reinstalling OpenSUSE Tumbleweed from scratch just to figure out how things are handled under this distribution, I thought I might as well ask here.

Any suggestions?

2

Some old Lenovo’s had a radio kill switch / slider could it be that? RH has been pretty good about maintaining old intel firmware. I have a t400 with the kill switch.

3

It’s not a kill switch problem. I investigated this a bit more, and it looks like this is firmware-related. Here’s the relevant snipped from dmesg:

[   17.565225] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: can't disable ASPM; OS doesn't have ASPM control
[   17.572159] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Detected crf-id 0xa5a5a5a1, cnv-id 0xa5a5a5a1 wfpm id 0xa5a5a5a1
[   17.572169] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: PCI dev 4239/1311, rev=0x74, rfid=0xd55555d5
[   17.931297] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-6000-6.ucode failed with error -2
[   17.932463] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-6000-5.ucode failed with error -2
[   17.932503] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-6000-4.ucode failed with error -2
[   17.932506] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: no suitable firmware found!
[   17.932507] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: minimum version required: iwlwifi-6000-4
[   17.932509] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: maximum version supported: iwlwifi-6000-6
[   17.932510] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: check git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git

Now what ?

4

I’ll answer this myself, since I just found the solution here:

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