Either I’ve installed some random extension, or Firefox is now taking you to the top Google search result for what you type into the address bar when what you’ve just typed in isn’t your standard protocol://server.domain/page type construction.
Try the following – search Google for ‘Unable to load firmware: 0xFFFFFFFE’ (without the speech marks). The top result should be (or at least, is currently) this page on one of Red Hat’s many Fedora related mailing lists. Typing (or copying and pasting) the same search phrase directly into the address bar should take you directly to the same page. Neat, eh?
The upshot of all this is that I typed ‘random google search’ into the address bar (really, I don’t know what I expected to see) and found this rather neat web page. Bored at work? Not any more. The wealth of teh Interweb is at your fingertips exactly how it wasn’t meant to be. Random, disconnected, rambling and arbitrary. Much like this blog post.
Enjoy..
P.S. If anyone is interested, the problem with my WiFi card was that after upgrading to a newer kernel (gentoo-2.6.14-r5 to be exact), I decided to use the built in support for the card (an Intel Pro-Wireless 2200BG), rather than the drivers/ieee802.11 stack from the Portage tree. This created a problem as the kernel drivers expected version 2.2 of the IPW2200 firmware, whereas the Portage drivers are more up to date and use version 2.4 firmware, which I had installed at the time.
So I unloaded the modules from the kernel, unmerged the old (new) firmware, added the line ‘>net-wireless/ipw2200-firmware-2.2′ to /etc/portage/package.mask and re-emerged the firmware. A quick ‘modprobe ipw2200′ and a slightly nailbiting ‘/etc/init.d/net.eth1 restart’ later and all is well.
This brand spanking new (old) firmware has the distinct advantage of supporting channels greater than 11, whereas the old (newer) version doesn’t. This appeared to have been arbitrarily removed by the firmware maintainer as if they didn’t realise that although channels > 11 have been deemed illegal to use in the US by the FCC, there is a much bigger chunk of the world in which you can use these channels. This has been causing me no end of gip at college as quite a substantial part of my bit of that world is the room I have my lectures in – it has a WiFi network running on channel 14 which I use to catch up on email, coursework and Slashdot, or at least, I did until I upgraded to a later version of the Portage driver. Now that I can access this network once more, I shall be shelving my amateur attempt to hack it back into the driver, which was going badly anyway as it gets the geography information out of the firmware which is closed source. Boo.
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