WiFi not working on Dell Inspiron 6400 - and now on Samsung Q35

[Mike Cohler]

Todd Zullinger wrote:

>I have an IPW3945 that's working fairly well for me on FC4.  I can
>help out to some extent, but there may well be some things that are a
>little different in FC5 which I have yet to install and test.  This is
>also the first wireless card I've had to play around with.  So take
>all this with a small grain of salt.

>> I prepared an ifcfg-eth1 file in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
>> directory.

>Did you create it by hand or use some tool to make it?  What's that
>look like?  I only ask to see if it's got anything funky in it that
>might cause you problems.

Thanks for your comments - I will respond to each below.

This (ifcfg-eth1) is a file which I have adapted from use with other
machines  - only changing the MAC address and has worked well with
ipw2200 on a different laptop so I can't imagine this is the problem.

>You said that it works fine when you use the load script from the
>build directory.  Just to be sure, is the module properly installed in
>/lib/modules/...?

As far as I know it is - it is in
/lib/modules/2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ and
appears alongside ipw2200 and ipw2100 .ko files from the stock system.

>> install ipw3945 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install ipw3945 ; \
>> sleep 0.5 ; /sbin/ipw3945d --quiet
>>
>> remove ipw3945  /sbin/ipw3945d --kill ; \
>> /sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove ipw3945

>That looks good.  It's what I have anyway, though I have mine all on
>one line (in case it matters, and if you aren't just breaking it up
>for the email).  And I'm using my wireless right now, so it definitely
>can be made to work.

I did remove the \ chars as I heard there was a problem with the
parsing of modprobe in fc5 but it made no difference.  Also in the
first line I added /sbin/modprobe -q eth0; as this is a work around
for some machines where ipw2200 does not work - but this also made no
difference.

>> If I try ifup eth1 after booting the terminal message is: "ipw3945
>> device eth1 does not seem to be present, delaying initialisation"

>I get that sometimes too, but it doesn't prevent it from working.  I
>believe this happens when the regulatory daemon needs to be started
>up.

Precisely - and the network won't run unless ipw3945d is running

>> I am using the 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp kernel -

>2.6.15-1.1833_FC4smp here, so we're talking fairly similar kernels at
>least.

>> Does anyone know how to get this to work so that it knows about the
>> wireless interface after bootup ?

>A minor complication in my setup is that I have tried to make things
>work as smoothly as possible to switch between the wired and wireless
>connections on my home network.  So I've added an init script and
>installed ifplugd to do link detection on the wired interface.  At
>boot time, if I'm plugged in, the wired interface gets brought up and
>if it isn't, the wireless interface gets started.  In the init script
>I do this just before calling ifup eth1 to make sure that the
>regulatory daemon is running:

>if ! ps -C ipw3945d> /dev/null 2>&1; then
>    /sbin/ipw3945d --quiet> /dev/null 2>&1
>fi

That is useful !

>It didn't want to start up right the first time after boot.  I'm
>pretty sure I read on the ipw3945 list or website that some other
>folks had this problem too.  I haven't tried it, but I'm wondering if
>switching /sbin/ipw3945d --quiet and /sbin/modprobe in the
>modprobe.conf entry would make this work better.  The module needs the
>daemon to start, and calling it as it is shown in the INSTALL doc
>seems backwards to me.

I will try that - but another useful snippet is that once booted up if I do
modprobe -r ipw3945
This does shut down the daemon and then doing
modprobe ipw3945
Does start it up properly !

So it works after the daemon has been shut down from the modprobe
command but not during boot !

>Anyway, hope this helps you along a little.  I'll be happy to try and
>figure out what's different between my setup and yours if you need
>more help getting things up and running.

I will try your suggestion and see if that works !
Mike

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Todd        OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xD654075A | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp

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mike cohler