Solved a problem with my wifi card on HP dv-5

Debian OpenLogo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On my Debian squeeze, I had trouble making my WiFi card work on my HP DV5 laptop. Indeed, I could not activate the WiFi card under debian, even if I logged into windows and put it on/off.

To debug the problem under Debian, I tried:

sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

But this command led to an error confirmed in the “/var/log/syslog” system logs:

Nov 10 16:11:05 LaptopPerso kernel: [  149.968739] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: firmware: requesting iwlwifi-5000-2.ucode
Nov 10 16:11:05 LaptopPerso kernel: [  149.973093] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: iwlwifi-5000-2.ucode firmware file req failed: -2

I solved this problem by unstalling the right drivers, as follows:

sudo apt-get -t squeeze-backports install firmware-iwlwifi network-manager-gnome 

sudo shutdown -r now