no wireless in Debian on laptop intel 2915ABG

[Paul Cartwright <debian@pcartwright.com>]

I booted a Debian 6 LiveCD to try out KDE4, on my older Dell laptop.
This laptop has an intel 2915ABG wireless setup. Right now I have
PeppermintOS install & wireless works just fine. with Debian, after I
booted, I looked at :

$ dmesg | less +/Network



and found this:

ipw2200 0000:02:03.0:firmware: requesting ipw2200-bss.fw failed: Reason -2
ipw2200: unable to load firmware: -2
ipw2200: failed to register network device
ipw2200: probe of 0000:02:03.0 failed with error -5


so, now we know it FAILS, but WHY...

I googled, but didn't see any resolution ( except for 1 Mandriva..)
I installed the firmware-ipw2x00 from the non-free source & also
downloaded from ipw2200.sourceforge.net nothing worked.
-- 

Paul Cartwright
Registered Linux user # 367800