Things on my mind. George Drapeau's Weblog

First, Credit Where Credit Is Due

I don't have time to make this a long entry, which is probably a good thing. I just need a place to keep this info. (gotta give credit where credit is due; I am stealing the idea of keeping tech-admin notes in a blog from this guy, my vice president. Thanks, Juan Carlos.

The Problem

So I bought myself a Canon SD-450 digital camera. The thing is way cool, and after I took some initial photos with it, I wanted to upload them to Shutterfly. I run the Java Desktop System Version 3 on my notebook computer, so thought I'd just connect the camera and JDS notebook via USB and transfer the photos.

Nope. No worky.

A Bone-headed Move

Next step was to upgrade the "hotplug" package from its default version of 0.44-whatever to 0.50-whatever. That was a Bad Idea (tm). Don't do that. My wireless network hardware stopped working; /var/log/messages shows the following:

Jan  3 23:35:46 lummi kernel: ipw2100: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 Network Connection
Jan  3 23:35:56 lummi kernel: ipw2100: eth1: Firmware 'ipw2100-1.3.fw' not available or load failed.
Jan  3 23:35:56 lummi kernel: ipw2100: eth1: ipw2100_get_firmware failed: -2
Jan  3 23:35:56 lummi kernel: ipw2100: eth1: Failed to power on the adapter.
Jan  3 23:35:56 lummi kernel: ipw2100: eth1: Failed to start the firmware.
Jan  3 23:35:56 lummi kernel: ipw2100Error calling register_netdev.
Jan  3 23:35:56 lummi kernel: ipw2100: probe of 0000:02:05.0 failed with error -5

I found a few references to this kind of problem on the net, but the answer seemed to be to increase the timeout in the file /sys/class/firmware/timeout from the value of 10 to 100. I tried that several times; it didn't work. Also, I could no longer plug in my USB keyboard and mouse. And even the default Ethernet driver didn't load by default. Things got pretty grim.

The Solution

Finally, I checked with YaST to see what it thought the default version of hotplug should be for this version of the OS. I then asked YaST to please re-install that version. YaST did that, I rebooted, and -voila- everything is fine again. Network drivers are loaded by default and work fine. I'm typing this blog entry on my ergonomic USB-attached keyboard.

Whew!