> I remembered that i also had started having a problem with my intel > wireless card, and it looks like both the intel and realtek firmwares > are now in linux-firmware so try emerging that.
That fixed it. Thank you very much. I'm a little puzzled because I don't get the "unable to apply firmware patch" messages on my desktop which also uses the r8169 driver and doesn't have linux-firmware installed. I guess linux-firmware is a package released by the kernel folks containing certain firmware blobs? It looks like rt73 is in there but not b43. - Grant
