Intel Pro Wireless 3945

[Todd Zullinger]

Oliver Ruebenacker wrote:
> Some weeks ago, my employer gave me a Dell Latitude D820 Laptop with
> an Intel Pro Wireless 3945 adapter. I installed FC6 and tried to
> make the wireless work, but eventually got the impression that one
> has to be a Fedora developer to be able to do that.

Nah, you can get it working with FC without a tremendous amount of
hassle (it's more work than it should be, but then, so is life :).

I've found that the packages from ATrpms work best for me.  I
installed the atrpms.repo file[1] and added a line to only include the
packages I wanted:

includepkgs=ieee80211-kmdl* ipw3945* yum-plugin-kmdl

Then you should be able to install the right stuff via yum (from
memory):

$ yum install ipw3945

The last wrinkle IIRC, is arranging to have the ipw3945 regulatory
daemon start up.  You can do this in /etc/modprobe.d/ipw3945 or via an
init script.  I went with the initscript method and poached one from
the FreshRPMS package:

$ wget http://svn.rpmforge.net/svn/trunk/rpms/ipw3945d/ipw3945d.init
$ sudo install -m0755 ipw3945d.init /etc/init.d/ipw3945d
$ sudo /sbin/chkconfig --add ipw3945d

Then reboot and hopefully you're good to go.  I've typed most of this
from memory, so pardon if I've missed anything.

> Then I heard that under F7, it would be "much easier". So I upgraded
> to Fedora 7 Test 4. There are some glitches, especially that the
> mouse seems to click on things by itself, but I am not aware how
> making the wireless work has become easier. So what exactly got
> easier?

Well, the newer iwlwifi driver is included by default in F7, as is the
needed firmware.  That part should make life easier than it is now,
where you have to install from source or one of a few 3rd party repos
to get the ipw3945 supported.

Just today on fedora-devel-list John W. Linville asked users to try
out the latest Dave Jone's kernel packages and report if they worked
better than previous ones.  It seems from reading that there are still
numerous bugs in the iwlwifi driver (one even mentioned oddities with
the mouse).  Hopefully those will be worked out before too long.

I've yet to make time to install F7T4 to try it out personally.

[1] http://atrpms.net/install.html

-- 
Todd        OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
======================================================================
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called
upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
    -- Oscar Wilde

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