[SOLVED]Arch not acknowledging wireless card.

Question

So Im a returning user, feel like a total newb again.
I recently purchased an "Asus k53sv-xr1"
The wireless card inside is "Intel Centrino Wireless-N 100," I determined this by installing the proper driver in windows and checking the device manage (as asus could not answer my question as to the model number and the spec indicate "integrated blahblahblah"
Following the "Wireless Setup Instructions" I did the following (filling the xs' with their respective version numbers)
"Installing Firmware (Microcode)
Important: Installing these firmware packages is not required since the 2.6.34 kernel update, when the firmware files were moved to the linux-firmware package.
If you need wireless connectivity to access pacman's repositories, the firmware files are also available direct from Intel. See this  page, select and download the archive.
$ wget http://intellinuxwireless.org/iwlwifi/downloads/iwlwifi-XXXX-ucode-XXX.XX.X.XX.tgz"
After downloading, you must extract and copy the *.ucode file to the firmware directory, commonly /lib/firmware
# tar zxvf iwlwifi-XXXX-ucode-XXX.XX.X.XX.tgz
# cd iwlwifi-XXXX-ucode-XXX.XX.X.XX/
# cp iwlwifi-XXXX-X.ucode /lib/firmware/"
The wireless setup manual goes on to say that
"If MOD_AUTOLOAD is set to yes in /etc/rc.conf (it is by default) that should be all that is required. Simply check for the presence of the drivers by running ip addr from a terminal. There should be a listing for wlan0."
My outputs are the following
lspci | grep -i net
03:00:0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Decive 08ae
04:00:0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/816B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev06)
lsusb
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp.
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:0139 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 058f:a014 Alcor Micro Corp.
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
iwconfig
lo    no wireless extentions
eth0 no wireless extentions
Thank you in advance!
Last edited by Stromblad (2011-08-16 02:13:50)

Answer 1

If anything I have (re)learned some things about whats going on, which...ultimately led to more questions.
First these two snippets led me to some interesting ideas.
"Installing Firmware (Microcode)
Important: Installing these firmware packages is not required since the 2.6.34 kernel update, when the firmware files were moved to the linux-firmware package.
If you need wireless connectivity to access pacman's repositories, the firmware files are also available direct from Intel. See this  page, select and download the archive."
From the  "Wireless Setup" Wiki
and
"Using kernels 2.6.24 and up
These kernels have the iwlwifi driver included and the released drivers (available from this site under download page) do  not  work with these kernels. If you want to run the latest (or very close to it) development code with your kernel then you should use the compat-wireless project that retrieves the latest driver development code from the  upstream repository. We do push our changes to this repository very frequently."
Which means that the firmware I downladed from http://intellinuxwireless.org/?p=iwlwifi, would not work.
I reinstalled, this time including the all the "iwl" packages from the "dev" section of the packages.
The result was the same.
dmesg | grep -i iw
would report nothing at all
until i input the command
modprobe iwlagn
then dmesg | grep -i iw would report
iwlagn: Intel(r) Wireless WiFi Link AGN driver for linux, 2.6.33-ARCH-ks
iwlagn: Copyright(c) 2003-2009 Intel Corporation
I really wanted to figure this out the arch way, but I can find little to no threads on my specific card.."Intel Centrino N-100 Wireless"
If anyone can help, it would be greatly appreciated. In the meantime, I will boot the ubuntu live cd and hope that wireless is automatically configured, that way I can at the very least, attempt to figure out what model card it reports and try again with that information.
My question, other than "can anyone provide some insight as to why the system can detect the card, but not be able to bring wlan0 up", is can modprobe insert modules that do not correspond with what is actually in the machine?
Thank you